Empatia, un ingredient de bază al întreprinderii etno/antropo/logice
The empathy, an essential ingredient of ethno/anthropo/logical enterprise

Summary/Abstract: My beginnings in social and cultural anthropology were more than fifteen years ago, attending a course taught by Gheorghiţă Geană at Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest. I noticed that the lecturer was talking many times about an “empathy lesson”. Indeed, it is a high probability that the anthropologist to establish an empathetic relation with those researched, at least as an answer to their empathy regarding his needs in the period he is in the field. For the British school of social anthropology the empathy is a key trait to an anthropologist. But this does not always happen. Sometimes the consequences for those researched are dreadful. The emergence of the empathetic act might take place post-factum, and an episode from my own fieldwork has this feature. The empathetic act is undoubtedly a source of knowledge. It is impossible for a genuine science of man, taken in his plenitude, to ignore this source. Epistemologically, the empathy takes the form of understanding.

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