An Ethnographer’s Experience in Interpreting Death

After reading the articles/chapters for this week, I was happy and relieved to find that ethnographers’ work is not easy to carry out and that there are many different ways of studying and writing about another’s culture. I obviously had been mis-informed or just confused when I first heard about ethnographic studies because the people discussing them talked about doing these types of studies, as if they were not difficult. I felt unsure and questioned how one could study another culture and feel knowledgeable and confident enough to write about it without essentializing that culture. When I read Clifford Geertz’s chapter on the Balinese cockfights and how he discusses that an ethnographer only has his/her own interpretation, I thought this sounded like a plausible explanation. In discussing the methods an ethnographer employs, Geertz asserts: “but whatever the level at which one operates, and however intricately, the guiding principle is the same: societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations. One has only to learn how to gain access to them” (453). Not only does the ethnographer only have interpretation, but every person living in a society has his/her own interpretation of what one’s culture represents.
Although I enjoyed reading and learning about Geertz’s ethnographic methods, threading that I most identified with was Renato Rosaldo’s chapter “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage.” First, he is of the same mind as Geertz when he says, “All interpretations are provisional; they are made by positioned subjects who are prepared to know certain things and not others. Even when knowledgeable, sensitive, fluent in the language, and able to move easily in an alien cultural world, good ethnographers still have their limits, and their analyses always are incomplete” (8). I believe that it is not possible for one to ever truly know another’s culture simply because of the fact that even within a culture every individual’s experience will be different. After Rosaldo begins his discussion of death and the Ilongot’s response to it and his inability to understand, he acknowledges that because ethnographers are outside observers, “such studies usually conflate the ritual process with the process of mourning, equate ritual with the obligatory, and ignore the relation between ritual and everyday life” (15). Death is confronted differently in every culture, and even though an ethnographer can observe the public rituals, there are many other private and personal aspects, such as emotions and everyday routines/rituals that are not able to be observed; the private ones hold as much, if not more, importance in understanding how a culture faces a loved one’s death. I am reminded of the chapter in de Certeau’s book “The Unnamable” and when he writes about the difficulties in speaking of death: “When it is repressed, death returns in an exotic language (that of a past, of ancient religions or distant traditions); it has to be invoked in foreign dialects; it is as difficult to speak about in one's own language as it is for someone to die ‘at home’” (de Certeau 192). Rosaldo also comments on North Americans’ reactions to death: “Yet most North Americans, especially those without personal experience of loss, find death subject best avoided. In trying to shield themselves from their own mortality, North Americans often claim that the bereaved don't want to speak about their losses” (56). When my grandmother passed away, I did find it strange the casual things we said to each other, the reactions of others, and the expectations I felt not to express my grief outwardly. When Rosaldo experiences the death of his wife, he realizes that now he can identify with the Ilongots’ grief and reactions in a more comprehensible way due to his own range of emotions. He writes, “The notion of position also refers to how life experiences both enable and inhibit particular kinds of insight” (19). It is important that Rosaldo acknowledges this but also realizes that even though he is closer in his understanding, he can still only have his interpretation. In an insightful observation, Rosaldo reminds us that: “The majority of intensive ethnographic studies have been conducted by relatively young people who have no personal experience of devastating personal losses. Furthermore, such researchers usually come from upper-middle-class Anglo-American professional backgrounds, where people often shield themselves by not talking about death and other people's bereavement” (55). It is the experience of events and the emotions that they produce that do allow us, while not fully, to relate more closely to others’ emotions. If one has not had similar experiences and emotions, one’s interpretation will be even more from the outside, looking in. Kristin