Remembering Renato Rosaldo, the anthropologist who lived with Ilongot headhunters

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MANILA, Philippines — A month has passed since the demise of respected cultural anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, whose famous work is closely tied to tribes in the Philippines.

Rosaldo died last May 26 in New York following complications of a stroke. He had just celebrated his 85th birthday the month before.

He took classes in anthropology, Spanish history, and literature at Harvard University, graduating in 1963 with degrees in the latter two.

In 1966, he married fellow anthropologist Michelle "Shelly" Zimbalist, who also studied at Harvard, and they spent the next two years doing dissertation fieldwork by living with the Ilongot (now called the Bulagkot) of Luzon, mountrain tribes known to be headhunters.

Rosaldo's studies culminated in his landmark book "Ilongot Headhunting: 1883–1974: A Study in Society and History," while doing psychological anthropology research on the Ilongot's expressions of emotion through figures of speech.

The couple returned to Harvard and received PhDs in social anthropology, with Shelly's PhD thesis focusing on the context and metaphor in Ilongot oral tradition.

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Both were hired by Stanford University in its anthropology faculty though they returned to be with the Ilongot in 1974 for further research. This led to Shelly publishing "Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life" in 1980.

Shelly unfortunately died in 1981 from an accidental fall from a cliff while conducting fieldwork with the Ifugao in the Philippines.

His wife's death left Rosaldo thinking about one Ilongot word they couldn't translate — "Liget." All they knew was when the Ilongot men felt that emotion, they wanted to ambush someone, cut off their head, and throw it away.

He learned, and later understood, that headhunting was how the Ilongot would process grief and rage.

"I experienced the deep cutting pain of sorrow almost beyond endurance," Renato wrote in the academic paper "Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage."

"Only then was I in a position to grasp the force of what the Ilongot had repeatedly told me about grief, rage, and headhunting," he added. 

Rosaldo maintained a strong relationship with Stanford, where he became the Lucie Stern Professor, a professor emeritus of the Social Sciences department, and chaired the Department of Anthropology.

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In 2003, he left to teach at New York University, where he became a professor emeritus and served as the first director of Latino Studies.

The anthropologist conducted research on cultural citizenship in San Jose, California, in honor of his Latino heritage and Mexican father.

He also served as director of the Stanford Center for Chicano Research and president of the American Ethnological Society.

Rosaldo also contributed to articles and chapters like "Ilongot Hunting as Story and Experience" in "The Anthropology of Experience" and "Of Headhunters and Soldiers: Separating Cultural and Ethical Relativism" in "Issues in Ethics."

Many remember Rosaldo as an anthropologist, but he was also a poet with book collections like "The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief," "The Chasers," "Diego Luna's Insider Tips," and "Into the World Outspread: Notes from a Walker."

Rosaldo is survived by his second wife Mary Louise Pratt, a professor emeritus of Latin American literature and languages at New York University whom he married in 1983, and three children. 

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