Renato Rosaldo

Renato Rosaldo is an American anthropologist known for his ethnographic work among the Ilongot of the Philippines and for his influential contribution to the anthropology of emotion. In his essay Grief and a Headhunter's Rage, he revisited his own earlier, more detached ethnographic account of Ilongot headhunting after the sudden death of his wife and fellow anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo, arguing that he had not truly understood Ilongot men's own explanation that headhunting was driven by the rage of grief until he experienced overwhelming grief himself, a case he used to argue that an anthropologist's personal positioning and emotional experience are not contaminants to be eliminated from analysis but genuine sources of ethnographic understanding. Rosaldo's later work extended this critique of supposedly neutral, objective ethnographic authority into broader arguments about culture, borders, and the limits of classic anthropological method, aligning him with the reflexive and postmodern currents in the discipline associated with the Writing Culture collection.