The ethnographer's magic as sympathetic magic

With all the attention paid to empathy in recent years, sympathy has received short shrift. Yet it is sympathy that has the longer legacy in anthropology, both as a descriptor for certain ways of relating to the world, and as a moral passion that characterises something important about the relationship between ethnographers and those they study. By juxtaposing biographical accounts of the author's own research with a reading of 18th‐century texts from the Scottish Enlightenment on sympathy, this essay calls into question the assumption that sympathy arises from, even as it generates, culturally inscribed forms of empathy or closeness. I argue that what Malinowski called ‘the ethnographer's magic’ is (or can be) a sympathetic magic woven from biographical threads, depending for its efficacy on concealment and action at a proximate distance, rather than ‘shared experience’, identification with research participants, or affective appeals.