“Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” by Renato Rosaldo

Thesis:
Emotional force refers to the kinds of feelings one experiences on learning. One
must consider, the subject’s position within a field of social relations on order to
grasp their emotional experience.
Evidence:
He reevaluates his previous ethnography of the Ilogot man of the northern Luzon,
Philippines and critiques his shallow explanations of the grief the men felt that lead
them to perform headhunting. He simply couldn’t understand that “rage, born of
grief, impels him to kill his fellow human beings”. Therefore, his first attempt was
to equate grief with sadness, brushing aside the rage in bereavement that the
Ilongot man explained were too simple and implausible. After losing his wife,
Shelly, he felt the sentiments resembling those that the Ilongot felt and felt
empathy and understanding of their desire to vent their wrath and lessen their grief.
Tools/Concepts:
Geertz, thick description, meant to include a rich account of a ritual including its
meaning, symbolism in order that an outsider can apprehend it in its complexity an
det also relate to it on some level. However, Rosaldo was critical of thick
description, arguing that it doesn’t matter how thickly you describe headhunting –
this was a practice you had to understand emotionally in order to truly understand.
His definition of a positional subject is that an anthropologist has a position, a
unique vantage point in which causes them to a subjective observer even when
they try to be as objective as possible. Personal experience is a vehicle for enabling
readers to apprehend the force of emotions in another culture.
He critical claims that eliminating qualities such as anger, lust and tenderness
distorts the descriptions and removes potentially key variables from their
explanations.
Concept of force means an enduring intensity in human conduct, in which can
occur with or without being associated with cultural depth.
Rituals can thus serve as the vehicles for processes that occur both before and after
the period of their performance. In such cases the ritual process can be only a
resting point along a number of longer processual trajectories; hence, the image of
ritual as a crossroads where distinct life processes can intersect.
Key Quotes:
“At the polar extremes, rituals could either display cultural depth or be brimming
with platitudes. In the latter instance, rituals could, for example, act as catalysts
that precipitate processes whose unfolding occurs over subsequent months or even
years” (Rosaldo, 130)
In attempting to grasp the cultural force of rage and other powerful emotional
states, one should look both to formal ritual and to the informal emotional states;
one should look both to formal ritual and to the informal practices of everyday life.
Symbolic analysis, in other words, can be extended from formal ritual to the
inclusion of myriad cultural practices less elaborate and circumscribed. Such
descriptions can seek out force as well as thickness.