Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork in the Ecuadorian Amazon among the Runa, this paper explores the ways in which indigenous Runa people manifest empathetic relationships towards animals and contrasts such experiences with Western conceptions of empathy.

Paper long abstract:

Within debates on empathy, it is often assumed that feeling empathy towards nonhumans requires an imaginative effort, which allows a human perceiver to partially grasp "what it might be like to be a nonhuman animal". While the difference between nonhumans and humans seems insurmountable from the perspective of Western academics, it is not conceived to be so by indigenous people who live in the Amazon, for whom access to the inner experiences of nonhumans seems to be relatively unproblematic. Drawing on fieldwork in the Ecuadorian Amazon among the Runa, this paper explores the ways in which indigenous Runa people manifest empathetic relationships towards animals and contrasts such experiences with Western conceptions of empathy. I will argue that, in order to investigate cross-culturally empathy-like processes towards nonhumans we need first, to pay attention at local understandings of similarity and difference and, secondly, to explore the role played by direct experience and imagination in shaping people's perception of nonhuman others.