Glenne Tietzer

Professor Robert A. LaFleur

Anthropology 206
20 December 2014

The Rosaldos: Two Interpretations of Ilongot Life

The history of anthropology is steeped in racism, imperialism, intrigue and theoretical

over-hauls. In the 1960s and 70s, the world of anthropology was going through yet another

transition. Now that in-person, on-the-ground field work had been normalized (think: going

native), ethnographers were looking more critically at the tools used to analyze groups of people.

Anthropologists had begun to recognize that they had been making many assumptions about

people in their work and that those assumptions were tied to their research methods. This was a

time of experimentation in anthropology. Ethnographers reformulated their tired ways and went

into the field, hoping to find a new kind of information.

Michelle Rosaldo and Renato Rosaldo were an anthropologist couple working together

among the Ilongot in the Philippines at various points during the 1960s and again in 1974.

Though they co-habitated and worked side-by-side in the field, they produced separate

ethnographies which are compared here. While the works are entirely separate, they have some

theoretical overlap in addition to their overlap of subject.

In Ilongot Headhunting, Renato Rosaldo clearly lays out his theoretical framework both

for the ethnography overall and for each individual chapter or subtopic. This focus on theory is

intentional. In the first line of the introduction, R. Rosaldo writes:

“This book should be read as a demonstration that ethnography stands to gain

considerable analytical power through close attention to historical process.”1

1Renato Rosaldo, Ilongot headhunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History. (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1980), 1.

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Not only is this ethnography meant to provide a record of the Ilongot people in the 1970s, but it

is meant to be a reexamination of ethnography itself. R. Rosaldo was working in an era of great

change in anthropology and anthropological thought. Objectivism was quickly rejected by a more

reflexive, post-modern way of thinking.2 Rosaldo continues, saying that the lives and lifeways of

the Ilongots “are simply unsuited for the set of conceptual tools developed by conventional

ethnographic methods.”3

Instead of the traditional approach, R. Rosaldo expresses the need for an historical

approach that looks at the society or group in question in its own historical context rather than in

another (most frequently a “Western” socio-historical context). In this way, R. Rosaldo made

himself a part of the developing Postmodern movement (often called post-structuralism in

anthropology). Most importantly for the purposes of anthropology, postmodern philosophy

rejects the assumptions of the Enlightenment which involved rationality, objectivity, and

progress. Postmodernists argue that humans cannot know about the world in ways that are not

tinged by their particular perspectives or biases.

By comparing his work to a turn-of-the-twentieth-century ethnography on the Ilongot by

William Jones, R. Rosaldo points out the flaws in the old ethnographic style. Much like

Malinowski’s game-changing diaries (which were published during the fieldwork for this

ethnography4 ) Jones’ diaries and letters revealed his true feelings for the Ilongot people. When he

was not idealizing this exotic and wild group of people, Jones described the Ilongot as dirty,

uncouth and frustrating.5

2 Mark Moberg, Engaging Anthropological Theory: A Social and Political History. (New York City: Routledge,
2013), Kindle Edition, Kindle Locations 6859-7603.
3 Rosaldo, Ilongot headhunting, 1.
4 Robert Gordon, Andrew P. Lyons, and Harriet D. Lyons, Fifty Key Anthropologists. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011),

Kindle Edition, 142.

5 Rosaldo, Ilongot headhunting, 5.

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 “The people come out of their shelters and lounge about in here till after the
morning meal... Their aspect is most repelling. Hands, faces and bodies are
smeared with blotches of various kinds of dirt; and their stiff hair is dishevelled.
As they sit and scratch their lousy selves they seem more like beasts than human
beings. These women suckle puppies.”6

Besides his own personal qualms, Jones fit the Ilongots into “a traditional ethnographic

mold”7 , deeming them a simple group whose social structure was non-existent or unintelligible.

No matter how offensive it is now, this view was completely appropriate for Jones’ time, long

before the postmodern or even modern context existed. R. Rosaldo decided to compile

information supplementing this older view with a newer one.

R. Rosaldo reveals that it was not his original intention to take an historical approach to

his work. He originally wanted to study only marital exchanges and patterns of feuding, using

any historical information only to construct a context in which to view these systems 8 . While

interacting with informants, R. Rosaldo found himself recording a great deal of Ilongot history.

Many of these emotional stories contained valuable information which, at first, went unnoticed

by R. Rosaldo. When he later noticed that he was lacking details of Ilongot history and life in his

doctoral dissertation, he decided to refine his case histories further when he returned to live

among the Ilongots in 1974.9 This refinement led to this final ethnography discussed here.

~~~

While there is some truth in Michelle Rosaldo's self-declared position as a “traditionally

oriented ethnographer”10 , she consciously forges into (then) new theoretical territory in

Knowledge and Passion. M. Rosaldo first became interested in anthropology because of its

6 Rosaldo, Ilongot headhunting, 4.

7 Rosaldo, Ilongot headhunting, 6.
8 Rosaldo, Ilongot headhunting,, 14-15.
9 Rosaldo, Ilongot headhunting, 14-15.

10 Michelle Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life. ( Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980), x.

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 connection to language and linguistics which she found fascinating. 11 She participated in the

growing subfield of symbolic anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s which examined the nature

and use of symbols. Her personal interpretation represents a break from more traditional

thinking. I will explain this break in more detail later. In this particular ethnography, it was M.

Rosaldo's intention to “document the enduring and intelligible shapes of Ilongot social action,”12

using linguistic and symbolic tools.

Her ethnography opens not only with background on the Ilongot and her theoretical

framework, but with her own background. This very clearly follows the self-reflexive trend in

ethnographic work that had begun surfacing in the 1970s. This reflexive tone continues

throughout the book, including the reactions of the Ilongot to her own use of birth control pills

and other personal details.

Solidly grounded in statistical data and also in the work of William Jones, M. Rosaldo

constructs an historical context in which the reader can view her findings. She explains that the

Ilongot were misunderstood by Jones in a number of ways, the most dramatic of which was that

he saw them as an “untouched” people. It was typical of Jones' time (the early 20 th century) to

seek out the exotic, original, and completely un-Westernized.

M. Rosaldo soon realized that the Ilongot had, in fact, a long and extensive history of

interacting with outsiders. They had withstood waves of Spanish and other immigrants as well as

the missionization of their area and a devastating attack by the Japanese during WWII. The

Ilongot had moved, split, and come back together multiple times by M. Rosaldo's arrival in the

Philippines. Though much of their social structure endured, there had been many opportunities

for exposure and change.

11 Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion, x.

12 Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion, xi.

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 M. Rosaldo's admits even more readily than Renato that neither of them “planned [their]

research with any more than a vague premonition of the direction of [their] present writings.”13

She goes on to explain that the theoretical tools and framework presented in this ethnography did

not come to her until 1974 on their return trip to the Philippines.

~~~

M. Rosaldo's choice to use Ilongot language as a tool for examining the Ilongot

themselves is an interesting one. This concept is outlined by one of her contemporaries, Malcom

Crick, in his piece “Ordinary Language and Human Action” written two years after M. Rosaldo's

return to the Phillipines in 1974. In this piece, Crick posits that “social inquiry which exploits

ordinary concepts will not depart totally from our ordinary understanding of ourselves.”14 In

other words, if an outsider uses tools already produced by a culture to study that same culture, it

will increase the accuracy and completeness of those findings.

Language is a prime example of this kind of tool. Language is made by a group of people

for that group of people. It develops over time, reflecting the needs, desires, and thoughts of the

population creating it. People will only create words that are useful for them. Someone,

somewhere, in some time needed that word. Any words that survive over time are usually not

maintained through strict adherence to rules, but rather through repetition.

More specifically, language is maintained through habitus. This is a concept posited by

Pierre Bourdieu in An Outline of a Theory of Practice. Bourdieu defines habitus as “the durably

installed generative principle of regulated improvisations, [producing] practices which tend to

reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions.”15 In other words, habitus, like

13 Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion, xiii.

14 Henrietta Moore. Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2014) 204.
15 Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) 78.

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 habit, is the process of maintaining and reproducing actions through the repetition of those

actions. Habitus causes many aspects of language to remain constant. This means that aspects of

a language are not necessarily maintained because they are the clearest or most efficient options,

but simply because they are consistently repeated.

Language is too often thought of as a static system with set, unchangeable rules. While

language can and often does maintain much of its structure and vocabulary, it can change

drastically. High school students deciphering the works of Shakespeare are acutely aware of this.

His works are written in English, but you will never hear anything like those dialogues walking

through U.S. streets.

While it is easy to see the stark difference between Shakesperean English and popular

U.S. English, it is also possible to see language's constant state of flux. Most notably, we are

constantly creating new slang. Slang terms are created for an infinite number of situations and in

reaction to specific events. This is especially clear online where new terms, puns, jokes, memes,

abbreviations, and more are constantly being produced. This production, though spontaneous, is

not random. The production of terms reflects real human experiences. In the words of Malcom

Crick:

“It is because human agents are able to use language, and because their
knowledge about their own action is substantially contained in ordinary language,
that the work of the linguistic philosophers has such a value for social inquiry.” 16

The very title of M. Rosaldo's ethnography follows this theoretical thread. Knowledge

and Passion or liget and bēya are key concepts in Ilongot culture. The Ilongot make many

important decisions based on heart and deep feelings. Anger, sadness and passion (liget) are the

16 Moore, Anthropology in Theory, 204.

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 driving forces behind the headhunting tradition for which they are famous and for which R.

Rosaldo's book was named.

Though M. Rosaldo originally thought the liget meant “no more than 'anger',”17 she soon

found that it had one of the most complex webs of meaning of any word she encountered. This

word and words related to it have always to do with heart. She soon learned its definition was far

more complex than a simple translation could reveal.

Figure 1. Michelle Rosaldo's glossary entry for liget.

This entry reflects how M. Rosaldo handles the definitions of terms throughout her

ethnography. In the twenty-one page glossary, she presents not only a simple definition of each

term, but also multiple examples of their usage which reveal the words' contexts and

connotations.

17 Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion, 45.

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 The importance and complexity of the word bēya matches that of liget. M. Rosaldo

defines bēya as “to know, knowledge.”18 This concept structures and shapes the wild passion

embodied by liget. Bēya is learned, developed or otherwise acquired through life rather than an

inherent or natural part of a person. “Ilongot babies 'know' nothing, and, lacking bēya, they are

extremely vulnerable to experiences of disruption and shock.”19 These learned aspects of human

life inform everything from head hunting to gender relations to life cycles.

Many anthropologists have seen words as symbols and symbols as things that are

primarily valued for what they represent. This representative value separate from the corporeal

object is an idea that M. Rosaldo rejects. Instead, she posits that the “meaning” and the object are

one in the same. The meaning cannot be taken from the object and the object cannot be taken

from the meaning. This is supported by anthropologist Webb Keane. Keane criticizes Saussurean

semiology which separates the realm of ideas from the realm of physical things.

An example he uses is the color red. We can understand what red is, but we will never see

it without other qualities also being present. A red apple is not only red, but shiny, hard, smooth,

sweet, round, etc. When these other traits are present (which they always are) they are also a part

of our consciousness. So an apple is not simply an object which conveys red, it is an apple.

Every aspect of the experience of an apple makes up our perceptions of that apple. “In practice,

there is no way entirely to eliminate that factor of copresence, or what we might call bundling.”20

Though Michelle Rosaldo calls herself a traditionally oriented ethnologist, her theoretical

approach is anything but. Webb Keane who was cited above did not publish those theories until

18 Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion, 242.

19 Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion, 63.
20 Moore, Anthropology in Theory, 510.

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years after Michelle Rosaldo published her ethnography. M. Rosaldo was treading on new

territory, even if her traditional teaching still influenced her.

~~~

Renato Rosaldo never labels himself as traditional in the way that Michelle Rosaldo

does, but intentionally breaks from tradition. He makes it clear that he does not think that the

kind of information he sought could be presented in the traditional format in the introduction by

saying “Certainly I and others of my generation find it impossible to fit the results of our

investigations into the classic ethnographic mold.”21 Instead, he insists that more attention should

be paid to the stories of the people being studied.

When R. Rosaldo first planned his research, he intended to examine marital exchange and

kinship. This would have been a more traditional choice. Many anthropologists studied peoples

in terms of their kinship, marriage relations, etc. George Peter Murdock, a famous mid-

twentieth-century anthropologist, compiled a collection of information comparing the social

structures of two-hundred fifty groups around the world. This was a completely library-based

project, meaning that Murdock did not actually have contact with any of peoples he wrote

about.22 This physically removed, cross-cultural, comparative study serves as an example of

exactly what R. Rosaldo did not want to do.

“To summarize briefly, Ilongot conceptions of history are embodied in stories.”23 Much

like Michelle Rosaldo, Renato uses these stories of the Ilongot people as told by themselves to

construct a story of their past. Following in the footsteps of the anthropologist Max Gluckman,

R. Rosaldo applied a theoretical model called situational analysis. Gluckman's situational

21 Rosaldo, Ilongot headhunting, 1.

22 Gordon Fifty Key Anthropologists, 164.
23 Rosaldo, Ilongot headhunting, 55.

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analysis is a process “by which anthropologists described and analyzed specific social events and

processes to get at social relations, structures, institutions, alliances, and contradictions in a

particular society.”24

R. Rosaldo is cautious with this approach. He rejects past constructions by ethnographers

of a typical life of a person in the group being studied.

“To begin, the very notion of constructing a typical life-- if taken as literal realism,
a statement of how certain people always have lived, live, and will live-- creates
the illusion of a static and homogeneous primitive society.”25

With this in mind, R. Rosaldo constructs general guides for various cycles and practices in

Ilongot life, especially “The Ilongot Male Life Cycle.”26 Though he criticizes the construction of

a typical life of an individual, he does not completely abandon the idea of constructing “a

composite rather than a particular biography... based on [his] knowledge of a number of Ilongots

at various phases of their lives.”27

This composite life cycle revolves around a series of steps to gaining knowledge. These

are shaped by various rites of passage associated with each age and level of mastery. To illustrate

this, I will use R. Rosaldo's explanation of early childhood development. In early childhood, rites

of passage include smiling, sitting up, crawling, walking, and other physical activities

demonstrating development. The child is not considered to have the capacity for thought or

knowledge until he/she learns to speak. Rosaldo continues explaining these rites of passage for

later childhood, youth (meaning adolescence), and adulthood. This generalized guide to Ilongot

life, though reductionist in nature, does avoid some problems caused by past ethnographic

analysis.

24 Gordon, Fifty Key Anthropologists, 78.

25 Rosaldo, Ilongot headhunting, 109.
26 Rosaldo, Ilongot headhunting, 136.
27 Rosaldo, Ilongot headhunting, 136.

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 R. Rosaldo is also cautious in his approach to Ilongot history. Much like the

anthropologist Sir E.E. Evans-Pritchard, he attempts to be as culturally relativistic as possible. 28

“Evans-Pritchard’s methods involved scrupulous attention to language and interviewing in depth,

with less attention to surveying, counting, or measuring.”29

Instead of assuming all peoples construct their histories in the linear and progressive model most

frequently used in Western history, he attempts to show how the Ilongot themselves view their

history. Much of Ilongot history revolves around the “dispersal and concentration”30 of their

population. This led many Ilongot people to see their history as unpredictable and improvised.

“Social order was conceived of less as eternal form than as a number of persons
walking single file along paths that shift in direction. At the same time that it
revealed a deep Ilongot cultural pattern, Tukbaw's [an informant's] narrative was
also 'a mere story'.”31

This relentless use of Ilongot stories in his analysis is the most notable aspect of R. Rosaldo's

theoretical approach.

~~~

While both authors produced innovative and interesting ethnographies, to me, Michelle

Rosaldo's work is more compelling. By connecting more to the language itself and less to the

interpretation of the stories, she superimposes less of her own thoughts onto the information. She

also pays attention to feelings and emotion more deeply and consistently than Renato. M.

Rosaldo's analysis comes across as tirelessly transparent and detail-oriented, while R. Rosaldo,

despite his efforts, maintains much of the generalizing, declarative voice of past anthropologists.

28 Gordon, Fifty Key Anthropologists, 55.

29 Gordon, Fifty Key Anthropologists, 60.
30 Rosaldo, Ilongot headhunting, 57.
31 Rosaldo, Ilongot headhunting, 57.

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 Though it certainly reflects the attitudes of the time, R. Rosaldo's approach to women

and women's roles in his writing is not only offensive by today's standards, but leaves out an

important aspect of Ilongot social dynamics. Throughout his book, women are only described in

relation to men. This is not explained to be an Ilongot point of view, but simply slips into the

ethnography under the radar. To the reader, this simply comes across as R. Rosaldo's own attitude

toward the people he observed. If that is the view of the Ilongots themselves, that should be

clearly expressed.

Both authors attempt to use the tools already present in Ilongot society to study that

society. M. Rosaldo uses the Ilongot's own language and R. Rosaldo uses the stories they express

with that language. This common theoretical thread (imposing as few foreign analytical tools as

possible) represents trends in anthropology at the time. Both authors were hyper-aware of their

own contexts. Michelle and Renato Rosaldo both present excellent analyses of the Ilongot people

and display mastery of the theoretical tools of their time.

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 Bibliography

Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1977.

Gordon, Robert, Andrew P. Lyons, and Harriet D. Lyons. Fifty Key Anthropologists.
Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Kindle Edition.

Moberg, Mark. Engaging Anthropological Theory: A Social and Political History. New
York City: Routledge, 2013. Kindle Edition.

Moore, Henrietta. Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology (Chichester: John Wiley

&
Sons Inc., 2014).

Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist. Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and
Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Rosaldo, Renato. Ilongot headhunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History.

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980.

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