Helping, Compassion and Reciprocity

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Greta Wagner
• Subject Area: Sociological Theory
• Term: from 2018 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 412111809

My ten-month research stay as a member of the Class of Social Science at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study represents an important stage in a project of several years. The topic of my habilitation is "sociology of helping". Its goal is to understand what expectations of reciprocity are involved in a volunteer’s help, what feelings and feeling rules emerge between those who give and those who receive help, what normative orientations guide the actions of helpers and what normative pitfalls helping produces in contemporary societies – especially when it’s motivated by compassion. I will examine these questions on the basis of my empirical study of refugee support initiatives in rural Germany. This study addresses volunteers’ implicit expectations of reciprocity, as well as succeeding and failing relations of reciprocity between volunteers and refugees in small villages. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations, I engage with both empirical and theoretical questions regarding gift relations of helping and their affective dimensions. At the IAS, I will present the first empirical and theoretical results of the study and write two articles. The first article is empirical and deals with the relation between helping and reciprocity. I use the documentary method to analyze my data and develop a typology of expectations of reciprocity among volunteers. The second article is theoretical and argues that compassion with sufferers can contribute to symbolic inequalities as well as to initiate horizontal solidary bonds. I will outline the debate on compassion as an emotional source of helping and problematize its dichotomy: Some scholars criticize compassion as paternalistic in its nature, others defend it as a moral sentiment that strengthens social bonds. Using examples from my empirical study on volunteers, I will address the implications of compassion for equality and inequality in relations between helpers and help-receivers. The goal of the project is to close a research gap in the sociology of emotions, which has until now not dealt systematically with compassion in helping relations. I also want to reach volunteers in refugee support. Reflecting on one’s own feelings and expectations can help prevent disappointment and withdrawal from volunteering. The project contributes to understand how to foster reciprocity between volunteers and refugees, and how to handle lack of reciprocity at a practical level.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor Dr. Didier Fassin