Renato Rosaldo, an anthropologist who helped dismantle the conventions of his discipline, notably through accounts of the accidental death of his first wife during their fieldwork in the Philippines, a shattering episode that Dr.
Rosaldo revisited in scholarly papers, autobiography and even poetry, died on May 26 at his home in Manhattan. He was 85. His death followed a stroke in April, his wife, Mary Louise Pratt, an emeritus professor of Latin American literature and languages at New York University, said. Dr.
Rosaldo’s career-making fieldwork was among the Ilongot people of the Philippines, mountain dwellers who were notorious for headhunting. Living among them for nearly three years, the Harvard-trained Dr.
Rosaldo was not so much fearful for his life as he was frustrated by the men’s terse explanations for why they would ambush another human being, chop off his head and toss it aside. An Ilongot man told him they head-hunted while grieving the death of a loved one, and could add nothing more.
“To him,” Dr. Rosaldo wrote, “grief, rage and headhunting go together in a self-evident manner. Either you understand it or you don’t. And, in fact, for the longest time I simply did not. ” We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
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