Renato Rosaldo's Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974

In fact, the point is make that to apply inappropriate concepts to a study of such a group as the Ilongots is itself a bias which is clearly counter-productive in terms of understanding the people.

For example, the rootage warns of the "weaknesses of synchronic studies in anthropology" and the impossibleness of trying "to fit the results of our investigation into the classic ethnographic mold." He adds that in studies such as that of the Ilongots

one encounters forms of life that are simply unsuited for the set of conceptual tools developed by conventional ethnographic methods (1).

In other countersigns, it would be a bias to see the study of the Ilongots as simply another(prenominal) investigation of people which fits neatly into the framework applied to originally studies of other groups. There is also the potential bias of wake a unique group like the Ilongots from the Western perspective, development Western standards of behavior. Rosaldo avoids such a bias by allowing himself to locomote involved in the lives of the Ilongots and to develop not only a sympathetic attitude, but to keep his ingest position in the research in mind.

Rosaldo selects a historical perspective, which allows him to compare his own approach to other, earlier ethnographers, and to include himself and his own position with celebrate to the people he is studying:

I begin by reflecting on the differences between my world and the world of William Jones, an ethnographer who knew the Ilongots late in the first decade of t

his light speed; the point is methodological, for just as I view the Ilongots in historical perspective, I must see myself in the corresponding way (1).

Rosaldo, Renato. Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980.

Rosaldo also allows the Ilongots to speak for themselves in narrative form. handed-down ethnographers force protest that such a methodology might sidestep some of the biases of the Western ethnographer, but it also introduces the biases of the Ilongots themselves. In other words, why should the ethnographer take these people at their word? What ensures that what they are telling Rosaldo is true?

However, Rosaldo does not take the narratives at face value as accurate or encyclopaedic depictings of Ilongot life and reality. Instead, he considers the narratives in the context of his own observations and non-narrative research. Also, the author argues that "ethnographers should attend carefully to compositional [narrative] modes, for what we have to say is rarely separable from how we say it" (21). In other words, even if the Ilongots were not portraying Ilongot reality in an objective, linear or accurately representational way, their narratives would still reveal much about their lives and their perspectives on reality. For example, the narratives of the Ilongots reveal that "one of the most deeply held Ilongot values is that their lives blossom forth more through active human improvisation than in accord with socially given plans" (23). The researcher who insists on see the Ilongots' lives as being in accord with such "socially given plans" allow for simply never come to the miscellanea of "historical understanding" Rosaldo seeks. Such a researcher will suffer from a conceptual bias which will keep back his study from having any significance, except as a portrait of his own biases.

In other words, Rosaldo recognizes that life, including ethnography, is dynamic, changing, evolving. In order to defame biases, he honors this dynamic process by exp
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