Introduction grief and a headhunter's rage

ENGL 102 Northeastern University Grief and a Headhunter Rage Discussion
Subject
Humanities

Course
ENGL 102

School
Northeastern University

Department
ENGL

Question Description
For this assignment, you need to read Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage by Renato Rosaldo, and then choose one of the questions from the attachements, and then write a short paper(about 3 pages).Robben / Death, Mourning and Burial Final Proof 25.9.2004 4:13am page 167 15 Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage Renato Rosaldo If you ask an older Ilongot man of northern Luzon, Philippines, why he cuts off human heads, his answer is brief, and one on which no anthropologist can readily elaborate: He says that rage, born of grief, impels him to kill his fellow human beings. He claims that he needs a place ‘‘to carry his anger.’’ The act of severing and tossing away the victim’s head enables him, he says, to vent and, he hopes, throw away the anger of his bereavement. Although the anthropologist’s job is to make other cultures intelligible, more questions fail to reveal any further explanation of this man’s pithy statement. To him, grief, rage, and headhunting go together in a selfevident manner. Either you understand it or you don’t. And, in fact, for the longest time I simply did not. In what follows, I want to talk about how to talk about the cultural force of emotions.1 The emotional force of a death, for example, derives less from an abstract brute fact than from a particular intimate relation’s permanent rupture. It refers to the kinds of feelings one experiences on learning, for example, that the child just run over by a car is one’s own and not a stranger’s. Rather than speaking of death in general, one must consider the subject’s position within a field of social relations in order to grasp one’s emotional experience.2 My effort to show the force of a simple statement taken literally goes against anthropology’s classic norms, which prefer to explicate culture through the gradual thickening of symbolic webs of meaning. By and large, cultural analysts use not force but such terms as thick description, multi-vocality, polysemy, richness, and texture. The notion of force, among other things, opens to question the common anthropological assumption that the greatest human import resides in the densest forest of symbols and that analytical detail, or ‘‘cultural depth,’’ equals enhanced explanation of a culture, or ‘‘cultural elaboration.’’ Do people always in fact describe most thickly what matters most to them? The Rage in Ilongot Grief Let me pause a moment to introduce the Ilongots, among whom my wife, Michelle Rosaldo, and I lived From Renato Rosaldo, ‘‘Introduction: Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage,’’ in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press; London: Taylor & Francis, 1993 [1989]). 167 Robben / Death, Mourning and Burial Final Proof 25.9.2004 4:13am page 168 Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage and conducted field research for thirty months (1967–69, 1974).