Grief and Rosaldo’s Rage Essay

She had not suffered much. Her death came and went quickly. Michelle was cold, gone forever at the blink of an eye. As her husband looked over her body at the bottom of a 65 foot sheer precipice, many ideas and emotions fluttered in his mind. Renato Rosaldo describes his experience at the site of the fatal accident, overlooking the body of his lifeless wife, Michelle Rosaldo I felt alike(p) in a nightmare, the whole world around me expanding and contracting, visu bothy and viscerally heaving (476). Although at the time of the t lyssady and many months after, Renato Rosaldo found himself in an much or less delusional state of grief, the calamity helped Rosaldo reach a state of enlightenment with his study of the Ilongot tribe.Michelle and Renato Rosaldo had studied the Ilongot tribe in the northern part of the Philippines as anthropologists. Renato Rosaldos past attempts at understand the Ilongots reason for head hunting, rage, born of grief, had failed using his method of hermene utics. The conclusions Rosaldo drew from this explanation were, at best, educated guesses. Trying to be objective to his study of the Ilongot tribe, Rosaldo could not understand the driving factor behind killing a fellow human as a way of dealing with the loss of someone close to you. What he later started to understand was that the ritual was something that could not easily and readily be described.It was not until the time of his wifes death that he could comprehend the force of anger possible in misery. The force was so strong within him that drawing parallels with the ways Rosaldos suffer kitchen-gardening had molded him into dealing with bereavement started to overlap with the Ilongot way. This turned on(p) force became the key in helping Rosaldo unlock the mystery of this rage via bereavement, and unfortunately, it could only when arrange at the price of Michelle Rosaldo. Renato Rosaldos explanation of why the Ilongot used head hunting as a way of dealing with bereaveme nt is compelling imputable to his understanding of stirred force through his own personal experience.After the loss of his brother, then four years later, the loss of his colleague, friend, and wife Michelle Rosaldo, Rosaldo experiencedbereavement and the stirred force that accompanies it first hand. Spending months grieving, Rosaldos insights on the topic of head hunting had changed dramatically. Shortly after his wifes death, an excerpt from his daybook concurs with the change of perception of the Ilongot people.My journal went on to reflect more broadly on death, rage, and headhunting by speaking of my wish for the Ilongot solution they are much more in touch with reality than Christians. So, I need a place to carry my anger and can we say a solution of the imagination is break away than theirs? And can we condemn them when we napalm villages? Is our rationale so much sounder than theirs (478)?Rosaldos experience with personal bereavement left him with a sense of what despai r and rage could conjure up in the human being. Wishing for the Ilongot solution himself, Rosaldo finally realized that the Ilongot were not as different as he had originally thought. The emotional force Rosaldo had felt has the same core as the force that pushed the older tribesman into a headhunting raid. Rosaldos comparison of his solution of the imagination and the ritualistic headhunting had rage as the common seed.Rosaldos initial attempts to find what drives the older Ilongot men to headhunt using traditional ethnographic methods failed. Renato and Michelle Rosaldo played a tape of a headhunting celebration 5 years prior, evoking great emotion from the crowd of Ilongot because the celebrator on the tape had already been deceased and headhunting was now forbidden. The song pulls at us, drags our hearts, it makes us think of our dead uncleLeave off now, isnt that enough? Even I, a woman, cannot stand the way it retrieves inside my heartAt the time I could only feel apprehensi ve and diffusely sense the force of the emotions experienced(473-474).Rosaldos emotional detachment from the man speaking on the tape recorder prevents him with identifying with the Ilongot tribesmen. This lack of emotional connection is understandable, as Rosaldo himself was obviously not as close to the man practicing the ceremony as his family. This understanding of the rage and sorrow that the Ilongot members had felt during the listening is a crucial element of how the dynamic between bereavement and sorrow function.Rosaldo understood that his analysis could easily be brought under fire due to the tying in of personal experiences during his ethnography of the Ilongot culture. Rosaldo concurs that there is potential for risk by saying, Introducing myself into this account requires a certain hesitation both because of the disciplines taboo and because of its more and more frequent violation by essays laced with trendy amalgams of continental philosophy and autobiographical snipp ets (475). The possibility for an anthropologist who brings personal experience into an analysis of a foreign culture to become too self absorbed is always possible.Rosaldo avoids this frequent ethnographic infringement by separating self righteousness from applying personal experiences for comparison in anthropology. Rosaldo claims that his and all interpretations are provisional, stating that they are made by positioned subjects who are prepared to know certain things and not others (476), which presents that he only began to fathom the force of what the Ilongots had been describing as the anger held because of bereavement.Although some would argue that the risks with mixing emotion during anthropological study are too great, total objectivity can not always pass on a complete analysis. Although being objective and getting the f veritable aspects of rituals and cultural symbols provides great insight of a culture and its formal procedures, it does not necessarily relegate the et hnographer the true experience of the event let it be bereavement or something else. The true meaning behind many events and cultural symbols that are looked at objectively are really quite open to interpretation.Who is to say that what the ethnographer interprets as being one thing, in turn, does not represent something totally different for the subject in reality being studied? Although it is not true for all cases, bereavement and the emotional forces that are its byproduct can only be successfully analyzed and understand when the observers experience overlaps or parallels that of the subjects. Rosaldo later found his own experience overlapping that of the Ilongots.After suffering through not only the loss of his young brothers life, but the loss of his wifes, Renato Rosaldos view of headhunting had drasticallychanged. Although Rosaldo had spent fourteen years attempting to conclude the actual drive behind the Ilongot murderous ritual using current anthropological methodology, in one swift moment, he had felt the drive within himself. This emotional force had left him seeking for the Ilongot solution. Realizing that this rage within him had pieced together the ethnographic puzzle of the Ilongot headhunting, Rosaldo masterfully avoided becoming too self absorbed while give his account of the Ilongot ritualistic beheading. Rosaldo posed the question, Do people always in fact describe most thickly what matters most to them (470)? After review of Rosaldos essay, one will most likely conclude that the answer is no.Works CitedRosaldo, Renato. Grief and a Headhunters Rage. Literacies. Ed. Terence Brunk Suzanne Diamond Priscilla Perkins Ken smith New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. 469-487