Are we all humans who can understand each other's hearts in ways that transcend our differences, or are our emotions so strongly shaped by our personal, cultural, and historical circumstances that we can never grasp the feelings of strangers? Stated in everyday terms, can a North American understand the liget that the Ilongot (of the Philippines) feel, and can an Ilongot understand North American anger? Can we read The Odyssey and understand the Homeric “spirit of battle” or look at the sorrow on the faces in a 14th-century Flemish painting and grasp the meaning of those expressions for the painter and for all the people who have looked at it over the centuries? Do people from different cultures have the same repertoire of emotions? These are profound questions because they address our ability to transcend our own limited life experiences and to learn from others who are different from ourselves, as the chapter-opening quotation implies.

Cross-cultural and transhistorical emotional understanding also has significant practical consequences. These days we find ourselves communicating with a much wider range of people than we did before the mass media, the Internet, and the jet plane connected people in a global web of messages. In the past (and still in many places now), you could live your entire life communicating almost exclusively with people like yourself. You had no access to and probably no interest in writings from long ago (except for holy texts that were interpreted for you). Now that situation has changed dramatically for many people. You may find yourself trying to make a joke during a lecture in Spain, only to have it embarrass everyone (Iglesias, 1996).