A brief overview:  Renato Rosaldo studied the Ilongot people of the Philippines for nearly three years with his wife, Michelle.  He focused on the practice of headhunting, which is killing and decapitating largely random victims.  The Ilongot themselves describe this practice as being a rage born from grief and bereavement.  Rosaldo details how he didn’t accept this explanation until years later, when his wife’s death forced him to confront his own rage, giving him a more emic perspective of the Ilongot’s practice.

Rosaldo differentiates between conventional funeral rites and the murderous act of headhunting as two reactions to loss.  He expresses that funeral rites don’t necessarily deal with bereavement; they are instead one point in the constellation of grief, something of an unfinished process that doesn’t provide real comfort to those close to the deceased.  He critiques other anthropologists for studying the trappings of ritual in funerary rites when real grief is expressed outside of the ritual context.  He reports that the headhunter throws away his suffering by throwing away the decapitated head of his victim.  Rosaldo appears to believe this is a more satisfying method of release than going through the motions of a funeral rite, and I can understand his sentiment.

However, at no point does Rosaldo judge the practice of headhunting itself.  Given his postmodern positioning, he frequently states his emotional experience and how his personal feelings intersect with his understanding of the practice, but never does he judge it as right or wrong.  How can we escape this?  When, as anthropologists, do we become confident enough in our moral standpoint to assert that a cultural practice is abhorrent, regardless of its function or context?  Cultural relativism is not moral relativism.  Surely the decapitation of random individuals to relieve one’s grief can be judged as morally deficient.

I can see a bit of a failing here in the postmodern perspective.  If Rosaldo had supplemented with a functionalist or materialist argument validating headhunting in some way, then an argument might be made for this ugly practice.  As it stands, Rosaldo got me to empathize with the people that decapitate their neighbors (and with him for the loss of his wife), but didn’t convince me that the Ilongot should get to keep doing it.  I recognize that wasn’t his goal, but perhaps moral concerns should have been addressed in his essay.