Culture & Truth: Remaking of Social Analysis by Renato Rosaldo

A great book; it must have articulated some of the incipient ideas in anthropology at the time (1989). Some of the ideas expressed in the book feel familiar, and other ideas feel fresh.

Rosaldo recalls his fieldwork with the Ilongots, who lived near Manila in the Philippines. The Ilongots practice head-hunting because of "the rage in bereavement." He could not understand the grief that they spoke of and tried to understand head-hunting intellectually, as a system of exchange; only after the accidental death of his wife could he understand the grief and rage they spoke of. While anthropologists in his time used words like thick description, richness, texture, and webs of meaning, Rosaldo introduces the concept of emotional "force." Positionality affects the anthropologist's comprehension of culture.

Anthropologists are not scientists with an objective bird's eye view onto the world; they are positioned subjects. The historical conjuncture of the late 1960s fractured the unified consciousness motivating "monumentalist" and classical forms of "objective" ethnographic writing that wrote of cultures in the "ethnographic present." As Rosaldo notes, writing in the ethnographic present sounds parodic for the "natives." Consider the following description of the mouth-rite (brushing one's teeth):

"The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures."

The classical form of ethnographic writing are but one possible mode. It strips events of the emotional force and render them as spectacle, and it makes it difficult to imagine spontaneity in these acts.

Rosaldo senses something else happening in the classical form of ethnographic writing. The form constructs an innocent and detached observer that allows the anthropologist to avoid complicity with the structures of domination that were actively changing the societies in which the anthropologist was studying. Rosaldo terms this the imperialist nostalgia (a great concept), "where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed."

In place of classical conceptions of culture, which have rigid structure and non-negotiable cultural boundaries, Rosaldo calls attention to the porousness of culture. Instead of "culture as a self-contained whole made up of coherent patterns," Rosaldo adopts the image of "culture... as a more porous array of intersections where distinct processes crisscross from within and beyond its borders." Interestingly, Rosaldo also describes rituals and individual identity in similar terms; ritual and identity is described as an intersection of various processes. (Perhaps this is due to the influence of structuralism, where the principles of structure at different levels are similar.)

Rosaldo attempts to open up avenues of study that were previously inaccessible in classical conceptions of culture and classical forms of writing. Instead of viewing culture as order and control over chaos, Rosaldo wonders about the unexplored "realm of 'nonorder'"--he notes that "human conduct often results from improvisation." He also tries to think about the tempo of a culture, which is difficult to capture. Finally, Rosaldo wonders about the narrative forms that anthropologists impose on their interlocuters--what kind of ethnographies could emerge if the narrative forms of the "natives" were used instead?

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