Augenblick and the ‘rush’ of the hunt: empathy and sociality with non-human others in Amazonia

This chapter examines how and when empathy is experienced by or made relevant for Amazonian Ese Eja when involved in encounters with non-human others. Drawing on a broad range of disciplines – anthropology, philosophy, cognition studies, neuroscience and sports science – I focus on extraordinary moments of empathy that shape ‘the rush’ of exceptional and incendiary instances that emerge from encounters between humans and radical others in communities, forests and dreams. This analysis is grounded in ethnographic research on Ese Eja experiences and attacks by animal predators in a variety of contexts. Given ontological underpinnings of human and non-human shared qualities and differences, and possibilities for intersubjectivity and transformation, this chapter views radical otherness as both radical difference and radical sameness, and examines how empathy arises in the swift transition from the former to the latter. It also seeks to better understand the extent to which empathetic relationships matter in relation to stress-infused physicality and perception. The Aristotelian notion of Augenblick (‘the glance of the eye’) as a ‘decisive moment’ (Ward 2016, p. i) and its Heideggerian usage as ‘the moment of vision, which temporalizes itself in a resolution’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 394) are used to elucidate links between empathy and encounters with non-human others in Amazonian cross-realities, dynamic overlapping worlds, to add to our understandings of radical othering. My hope is to contribute to interdisciplinary literatures that view empathy as linked to action and to present an additional layer of perspective-taking through an examination of the Amazonian literature.