Haylee Seq 8 Assn 3

Grief and a Headhunter's Rage, Rosaldo

The familiar setting is that of an ethnographer studying a culture's beliefs and rituals. This essay focuses on the ritual of headhunting.

Rosaldo makes a strong point against traditional ways that ethnographers typically study a culture.
"Many studies focus on visibly bounded arenas where one can observe formal and repetitive events, such as ceremonies, rituals, and games." (595)

On grieving..."Note that all the instances Wilson witnesses or hears about happen outside the circubscribed sphere of romal ritual...The work of grieving, probably universally, occurs both within obligatory ritual acts and in more everyday setting where people find themselves alone or with close kin." (596)

Rosaldo feels that in only looking at the ritual surrounding an event, such as death, one loses the chance for deeper understanding.

"In attempting to grasp the clutural force of rage and other powerful emotional states, both formal ritual and the informal practices of everday life provide crucial insight. Thus cultural descriptions shouls seek out force as well as thickness, and they should extend fro well-definedrituals to myriad less circumscribed practices." (597)

Rosaldo, as an ethnographer, attempted to approach the understanding of the ritual ofheadhunting using classical anthropological techniques. However, it was only through his own personal experiences of grief, that he was able to comprehend the headhunting. Although ethnographers are typically knowledgable and fluent in the culture they are attempting to understand, that they are limited by perspective and experience.

It is not typical for an ethnographer to resort to personal experience to bring about understanding. In anthropological circles, Rosaldo has not remained the unattached observer. He has now drawn on personal experience, and thus risks ridicule from those he seeks to influence.
"My use of personal experience serves as a vehicle for making the quality and intensity of the rage in Ilongot grief more readily accessible to readers than certain more detached modes of compostition. At the sames, time, by invoking personal experience as an analytical category one risks easy dismissal." (594)

Haylee: Seq 7 Assn 5

What is the author saying that is experimental?

Anzaldua speaks of her cultural heritage mixing history and mythology. She makes bold statements about violence, feminity, religion.

"My family, like most Chicanos, did not practice Roman Catholicism but a folk Catholicism with many pagan elements." (p.65)

"The male-dominated Azteca-Mexica culture drove the powerful female deities undergound by giving them monstorous attributes and by substituting male deities in their place, thus splitting the female Self and the female deities." (p.65)

"Thus the Aztec nation fell not because malinali (la Chingada) interpreted for and slept with Cortes, but because the ruling elite had subverted the solidarity between men and women and between noble and commoner." (71)

"The Catholic and protestant religions encourage fear and distrust of life and of the body; they encourage a split between the body and the spirit and totally ignore the soul; they encourage us to kill off parts of ourselves." (p.74)



Anzaldua says "The whole thing has had a mind of its own, escaping me and insisting on puttion together the pieces of its own puzzle with minimal direction from my will."



She approaches is as if it took her by surprise. She is writing about being in a cultural purgatory; not American, not Mexican, or Spanish; being separated from her language. She combines poetry with history with personal story. She is angry and the audience is not necessarily her friend. While many authors tend to try to connect with the audience, Anzaldua writes wholly from her own perspective, many times alienating a reader; but nevertheless, needing to tell her story her way. It can be uncomfortable to read and try to relate to her. It can be offensive or aggressive. She is a wisewoman, a confused girl, an angry feminist. She writes many times in a different language, without interpreting; combining English with Chicano Spanish.

I think this essay is a very effective as far as it shows the weaving of history and myth. The tough truths to tell. The first time I read through this essay, I felt like I was being insulted. The more and more I turned back to it, I found elements of myself rising to the top.