Renato Rosaldo

Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage

If you ask an older Ilongot man of northern Luzon, Philippines, why he cuts off human heads, his answer is brief, and one on which no anthropologist can readily elaborate: He says that rage, born of grief, impels him to kill his fellow human beings. He claims that he needs a place ‘‘to carry his anger.’’ The act of severing and tossing away the victim’s head enables him, he says, to vent and, he hopes, throw away the anger of his bereavement. Although the anthropologist’s job is to make other cultures intelligible, more questions fail to reveal any further explanation of this man’s pithy statement. To him, grief, rage, and headhunting go together in a selfevident manner. Either you understand it or you don’t. And, in fact, for the longest time I simply did not. In what follows, I want to talk about how to talk about the cultural force of emotions. The emotional force of a death, for example, derives less from an abstract brute fact than from a particular intimate relation’s permanent rupture. It refers to the kinds of feelings one experiences on learning, for example, that the child just run over by a car is one’s own and not a stranger’s. Rather than speaking of death in general, one must consider the subject’s position within a field of social relations in order to grasp one’s emotional experience. My effort to show the force of a simple statement taken literally goes against anthropology’s classic norms, which prefer to explicate culture through the gradual thickening of symbolic webs of meaning. By and large, cultural analysts use not force but such terms as thick description, multi-vocality, polysemy, richness, and texture. The notion of force, among other things, opens to question the common anthropological assumption that the greatest human import resides in the densest forest of symbols and that analytical detail, or ‘‘cultural depth,’’ equals enhanced explanation of a culture, or ‘‘cultural elaboration.’’ Do people always in fact describe most thickly what matters most to them?

The Day of Shelly’s Death

This deeply moving collection of poetry by Renato Rosaldo focuses on the shock of his wife Michelle (Shelly) Rosaldos sudden death on October 11, 1981. Just the day before, Shelly and her family had arrived in the northern Philippine village of Mungayang, where she and her husband Renato, both accomplished anthropologists, planned to conduct fieldwork. On October 11, Shelly died after losing her footing and falling some sixty feet from a cliff into a swollen river. Renato Rosaldo explored the relationship between bereavement and rage in his canonical essay, Grief and a Headhunters Rage, which first appeared in 1984 and is reprinted here. In the poems at the heart of this book, he returns to the trauma of Shellys death through the medium of free verse, maintaining a tight focus on the events of October 11, 1981. He explores not only his own experience of Shellys death but also the imagined perspectives of many others whose lives intersected with that tragic event and its immediate aftermath, from Shelly herself to the cliff from which she fell, from the two young boys who lost their mother to the strangers who carried and cared for them, from a tricycle taxi driver, to a soldier, to priests and nuns. Photographs taken years earlier, when Renato and Shelly were conducting research across the river valley from Mungayang, add a stark beauty. In a new essay, Notes on Poetry and Ethnography, Rosaldo explains how and why he came to write the harrowing yet beautiful poems in The Day of Shellys Death . More than anything else though, the essay is a manifesto in support of what he calls antropoesia , verse with an ethnographic sensibility. The essay clarifies how this book of rare humanity and insight challenges the limits of ethnography as it is usually practiced.

Notes toward a Critique of Patriarchy from a Male Position

What are the possibilities of a critique of patriarchy from a male position ? Would it raise distinct issues from critiques from a female position ? Using chicana and chicano narratives, along with issues of succesion, the A. tries to open a possible line of analysis.