Reinvigorating Social Support Systems in Rural Northwestern Ghana: Towards Affective Empathy in a Neoliberal Age

Abstract

Scholars frequently allude to the concept of a supportive extended family system that provides a lifeline to less privileged members of society, such as the indigent and the aged. Yet, the extended family and the network of support it enables have come under immense threat from neoliberalism. This article examines the constrained role of the extended family system and its implications, based on residential ethnographic fieldwork data gathered in rural northwestern Ghana. It draws on transnational discourses on empathy and local conceptions of interdependence and unity as encapsulated by African communitarian philosophies such as Ubuntu and Te jaa bonyeni of the Waala people of northwestern Ghana to explore how to generate empathy. Neoliberal individualist values have intensely undermined the support networks of the extended family system. Te jaa bonyeni philosophy, similar to Ubuntu, and many humanistic philosophies, offers important opportunities for reinvigorating debates on African indigenous support networks as important steps towards nurturing affective empathy. This study contributes to discourses on affective empathy by connecting it to communitarianism. Cultivating empathy is necessary towards imagining forms of existence that are dignifying for the marginalized and preventing them from descending into abysmal deprivation.