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)