My research into compassion in health care elicits a mixed response from my friends in religious communities.

They are curious and enthusiastic because they know that compassion is a key issue in health care. But when they realize that compassionate values arise from complex religious traditions, they share associated concerns that this anthropological lens may capture only a superficial part of a complex topic.

Anthropologists studying American life have mostly ignored mainstream religions. It is a great failing in our representation of American life. So why would an anthropologist want to step into this arena? My primary research is in the ways that people who live with major chronic illness structure their lives, which has led me to matters of spirit. American health care systems have strong, if sometimes hidden, roots in religious traditions.

Many people have told me how important compassion has been in their lives, whether it has been compassion received or lacking from a physician, nurse, friend, or relative, or whether learned internally from one's own experience of suffering.

Compassion is a multiform concept: it is a sentiment that has historical value in many societies, it is a touchstone for helping professions, and it is a virtue and core teaching of most major religious traditions. Diana Cates, author of Choosing to Feel, and Joel Shuman, author of The Body of Compassion, are ethicists who recently developed formulations of the philosophical and theological ethics of compassion. These books present carefully argued theses. While the thought experiment of the philosopher and the argumentation of the theologian can provide extraordinary insight into compassion, the anthropologist takes a somewhat different route to understanding. The anthropologist does not primarily engage the content of sentiments, touchstones, and virtues. Instead, the focus is on the meanings and uses that people make of these values, both in social process, the ways that things get done, and lived experience, the felt reality of things.

My analysis of compassion began with an exploration of the understandings of compassion held by both lay and clergy Buddhists, Christians, and Jews in contemporary Northern California. This analysis is not yet complete. However, two points that have already arisen from this analysis should illustrate some of the benefits and pitfalls of an anthropological approach to religious and spiritual values.

The first thing that struck me was that my informants seldom used formal religious language to describe compassion. Instead, when talking about compassionate feelings and actions, people were more comfortable with psychological and instrumental language. In extended discussions, some informants never made a single religious reference to compassion. Yet, at the end of the interview, they would inevitably say that their religious tradition was a fundamental source of their understanding of compassion. Questioning that didn't specifically probe for these roots would likely have led to the conclusion that these people were talking about an entirely secular, psychological construct. It is only when those discussions were put together with my informants' description of the sources of their thinking, and their acknowledged discomfort with religious language, that I realized that the fundamental motivation for action arose from religious values.

Second, compassion was commonly understood as an everyday thing—not requiring drama or large effort but consisting of small acts. Over and over, when people described compassion in others, they referred not to monumental actions or events in people's lives, but to small behaviors: ways of listening and supporting others that were hard to describe because of their seeming ordinariness. At the same time, while recruiting participants for the study, I was regularly told, "Why do you want to talk to me? I'm not a compassionate person." This suggests a conflict between compassion conceptualized as a heroic phenomenon and compassion experienced in the mundane.

As anthropologists studying American society, we are at our best when we stand as the sympathetic outsider—sympathetic because we deliberately value all human forms of relation and seek to comprehend all viewpoints, and an outsider because we try not to be embedded in any single worldview. As outsiders we can examine the places where religious worldviews collide with everyday life in American society. Thus, when we see the psychologizing of values such as compassion we begin to ask questions about how the very framing of religious values as psychological traits limits the role of spiritual perspectives in community life.

While anthropologists have traditionally studied "the other," we are more often now working in our own communities. There are problems associated with being insiders, mostly related to presuming to understand that which we actually do not understand or assuming too much. If we are not believers, we are outsiders to the religious tradition and may reflect more on what we share with our informants in other parts of life. If we are believers, our belief makes us insiders in some circumstances and outsiders in others. The anthropologist who is a believer may not trivialize religion, but stepping back from the object of study may be difficult and may require constant questioning of our understanding of our own religious community. Additionally, scholars who admit to being religious may be judged by colleagues as not sufficiently detached to study religious phenomena fairly.

A secular academic viewpoint may downplay the distinctive visions of human nature and human destiny that make religion worthwhile for its practitioners. Inserting religious constructs squarely into everyday life can lead us to translate them into mere psychological predispositions, where they lose their power and flavor. This minimizes key concepts by deleting those elements of lived experience that appear to be either non-rational or spiritual. In the case of compassion, we found that even our religious informants were more comfortable speaking in psychological or instrumental language. In this case, the anthropologist and the American informant face the risk of colluding in downplaying the religious motivations for everyday actions.

There are many risks inherent in speaking across intellectual traditions—and risks in not speaking. Theologians, ethicists, and anthropologists who engage each other in topics such as compassion may miss each other's point much of the time. But with care, our vastly differing perspectives can enrich our thinking. The outcome will be a better and more complex understanding.

Works Cited
The Fetzer Institute (http://www.fetzer.org)