The question of grief and how we allow or disallow certain griefs (necesarily) is socially one of empiricism. We allow ourselves to grieve at times removed, sometimes, from the very cause of our grief. And in this way, amongst others, we might find even the slightest infraction of space and emotion, unbearable. Another empirical question: individual and collective grief, that is thinking through the last post in this series, personal and public grief. In a common sensical way one assumes that one needs to censor individual grief so that we don't burn black holes through the social fabric. Another convention might be: without individual pressure releases, the social fabric itself becomes fissionable, given to many minor combustions, not unlike historical periods across the globe where public lynchings and other forms of vigilante justice have dominated. The extimate sociality produced in the wake of events like COVID speak however of even more differentiation and granularity in the dynamics of grief.
It is an empirical question also in the sense that much of social expression of grief is a measured and ritualized activity in the largest part, with clear lines of performativity. Further also there is the personal measurement of one's own expression of grief, when can I express grief and how. We measure ourselves rather like reading a weather report, predictively, anticipating normalcy and measurable frequency. And then of course there are storms, outpourings, and laments; so distinct from the ritualized acts of wailing, laments and complaints question the limits of one's placement in the social world, ask questions of the inherent injustice of being forced to take on a particular cage, a particular identity.
Grief itself can be seen along Freud's Melancholia-Mourning axis. Melancholic grief is extimate, the grief involved in minor daily practices of mourning, precisely because we dont know its source.
However the issue is even more complex than this, we can say that in a Sociological sense the difference between Mourning and Melancholia is kinship. Say for example a person loses someone close to them, it is their right to grieve, on the other hand what if they meet a person for the first time and that person dies the next day, how would the social stipulate commensurate grief for this? Schneider in his 'American Kinship' makes the point that the eventual link between culture and family is made through time spent in the presence of the other.
I argue here that this is a skewed view of social reality, especially today. What defines terms like breadcrumbing, ragebaiting, and ghosting etc. are a kind of disorientation produced by an already ambiguous encounter. In fact, and this is my central point, grief does not always translate into one large corpus, like a ball in the body, but is distributed across sites of the everyday, grief too, even of the greatest kind is experienced through le petite mort: the little deaths of the everyday. I believe this is how we should read Renato Rosaldo's ethnographic poetry.
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Renato and Michelle Rosaldo (Shelly), were a couple, who as was the practice in anthropology a few decades back, conducted fieldwork together, in the hilly regions of the Phillipines amongst the Ilongot people. Renato Rosaldo studied head hunting amongst the Ilongot, and his initial work, apart from speculating on the culture and everyday life of the Ilongot Rosaldo studies head hunting as a form of exchange. The Illongot head hunt in grief, and the bans on headhunting imposed by Christian colonialism render the tribe in a horrible state of despair. Without headhunting grief itself becomes the overwhelming force in the society.
Rosaldo in his initial work speculates on why the Illongot's headhunt upon losing someone. He records this in an exquisite piece he writes after 1981:
When Ilongots told me, as they often did, how the rage in bereavement could impel men to headhunt, Ibrushed aside their one-line accounts as too simple, thin, opaque, implausible, stereotypical, or otherwise unsatisfying. Probably I naively equated grief with sadness. Certainly no personal experience allowed me to imagine the powerful rage Ilongots claimed to find in bereavement. My own inability to conceive the force of anger in grief led me to seek out another level of analysis that could provide a deeperexplanation for older men’s desire to headhunt. Not until some fourteen years after first recording the terse Ilongot statement about grief and a headhunter’s rage did I begin to grasp its overwhelming force. For years I thought that more verbal elaboration (which was not forthcoming) or another analytical level (which remained elusive) could betterexplain older men’s motives for headhunting. Only after being repositioned through a devastating loss of my own could I better grasp that Ilongot older men mean precisely what they say when they describe the anger in bereavement as the source of their desire to cut off human heads. Taken at face value and granted its full weight, their statement reveals much about what compels these older men to headhunt. In my efforts to find a ‘‘deeper’’ explanation for headhunting, I explored exchange theory, perhaps because it had informed so many classic ethnographies.
One day in 1974, I explained the anthropologist’s exchange model to an older Ilongot man named
Insan. What did he think, I asked, of the idea that headhunting resulted from the way that one death(the beheaded victim’s) canceled another (the next of kin). He looked puzzled, so I went on to say that the victim of a beheading was exchanged for the death of one’s own kin, thereby balancing the books, so to speak. Insan reflected a moment and replied that he imagined somebody could think such a thing (a safe bet, since I just had), but that he and other Ilongots did not think any such thing. Nor was there any indirect evidence for my exchange theory in ritual, boast, song, or casual conversation.
In retrospect, then, these efforts to impose exchange theory on one aspect of Ilongot behaviorappear feeble. Suppose I had discovered what I sought? Although the notion of balancing the ledger does have a certain elegant coherence, one wonders how such bookish dogma could inspire any man to take another man’s life at the risk of his own.
On October 11, 1981 when Shelly and Renato were returning to their fieldsite around 90 km north of Manila, the capital of the Phillipines, and were trekking along to reach a village, when Shelly slipped down a slope, and fell to her death in the river below.
Renato Rosaldo writes 'Grief and the Headhunter's rage' a few years in the wake of this. The loss of his wife changes how he feels about grief and death amongst the Illongot.
In many ways, thinking about this piece now, for over a decade, I have felt that what Rosaldo describes as his 'exchange theory' is really the conventional place we give grief in modernity, that is it is a question of empiricism and measurement: how much grief is propotional to what event.
Grief however even within the modern configuration has shown itself to be impervious to such political stricture. As we discussed in the previous piece, the transformation of the personal (internal feeling) directly into the political produces a highly volatile society.
Writings in English especially need to emphasize the rage in grief. Although grief therapists routinely encourage awareness of anger among the bereaved, upper-middle-class Anglo-American culture tends to ignore the rage devastating losses can bring. Paradoxically, this culture’s conventional wisdom usually denies the anger in grief at the same time that therapists encourage members of the invisible community of the bereaved to talk in detail about how angry their losses make them feel. My brother’s death in combination with what I learned about anger from Ilongots (for them, an emotional state more publicly celebrated than denied) allowed me immediately to recognize the experience of rage.
Ilongot anger and my own overlap, rather like two circles, partially overlaid and partially separate. They are not identical. Alongside striking similarities, significant differences in tone, cultural form, and human consequences distinguish the ‘‘anger’’ animating our respective ways of grieving. My vivid fantasies, for example, about a life insurance agent who refused to recognize Michelle’s death as job-related did not lead me to kill him, cut off his head, and celebrate afterward.
Rage for Rosaldo is not just a stage of grief, it is its most direct expression, the only way that grief, can find some meaning. My simple insight here, is that if we argue in the Freudian sense that grief in the loss of another is normalized through mourning, we miss the fact that grief has universal but multiplicitous expressions. Also, the closer we look at the distinction between mouring and melncholia the harder it is to make a clear distinction in their outcomes, it is not that mourning ceases with the killing of another man, it is not a question of balancing an imaginary ledger, but rather of the singular expression of an individual life, rests in its travails, in its battles, and the social sedmientation of this fact muffles, the sheer singularity of a human life.
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While it is certainly true that our increasing focus on the self as a commodity has led to a kind of mythologization of every story lived by a person (curiously anthropology's own modern praxis), this has also been accompanied by a dilution of social networks. It is perhaps for this reason that existential crises have become so prevalent. Ideas like the post-COVID generation are 'psychologically more sensitive' are half-truths and semi-eugenic ideas. Clearly sensitivity only increases with the depletion of networks. In fact extimacy in many ways is produced through events that have the structures of disasters: weakening kindred networks. However it is more than this that is at stake. Marcel Mauss makes the point that the modern Christian self's interiority is produced at the nexus of Christianity and Roman law that instantiates this interiority. Most of Mauss's 'The concept of the person' seems to borrow from Hegel's fifth chapter from the POS, where he discusses Antigone, as the birth of the self, through a conflict between family allegiances and social/state based duties.
In a very similar way I would like to suggest that the newest post-the-mining-of-personal-data-as-a-commodity-self has been produced through a contradiction between the concept of the person and the concept of the personal.
Personhood in anthropology is perhaps best explicated by the idea that in many tribes even the given name of a person is often that of a known ancestor from the tribes past. The named person is thus already 'someone' that is part of a structured mythos. However today such forms of personhood have been entirely derascinated in favour of the 'personal', the story of one's own life.
It is not well thought out I believe to argue that the destruction of personhood in this way is in fact the destruction of the possiblity of politics beyond that of the therapeautic as a final configuration in the transitions between the personal-political::private:public following from modernity.
(diagram explained in previous post in this series)
Irrespective of the name we give this new emergent form of sociality what becomes crucial to understand about the 5th (not depicted in the diagram) therapeautic configuration of sociality is that social networks and sociality is now based on ephemerality. Evanascence, ephemeral transitoryness, transience, fleetingness: all these words circulate as names for modern sociality. This is not a fascist program, this is the structure of extimacy itself. Capital is inherently tied to fascistic politics, and the tendency for ephemerality to be tied to a kind of fascistic subject, is deep, precisely because ground level fascistic politics, is based on a derascination of history.
It becomes crucial for us thus to reconsider ephemerality, as a consequence of the therapeutic social configuration. To return to the question of grief: I would argue that in Rosaldo's case it is not merely a single event that troubles him, but the very weaving of a traumatic past into the gestures of the everyday, small, fleeting occurences that still have a larger effect, that make grief in its very form, immeasurable, that the absolutely microscopic tells us more about our so called selves than the larger movements that we transact or consume of ourselves in modern or post modern (therapeutic) social configurations.
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In an interview when asked about his book of poems describing his fieldsite and his experienecs in the field around the tragedy of Shelly's death Rosaldo in an interview describes how he came to write the book of ethnopoetry called 'The Day of Shelly's Death':
What happened was on September 26, 1996 I sufered a stroke, and within— I’d like to think within a week, but it must have been a little bit longer than that— within a short time, a couple of weeks, poems started coming to me and I was sitting there and these lines would start coming to me. I didn’t know exactly what they were and so what I started doing was I started writing them down because I thought I should do that. . . . I had never written poetry before. I’d written a lot of prose with a lot of attention to writing, so I thought of myself as a writer and a teacher. . . . But the last thing I expected to do was for poems to start coming to me. . . . So, as I began healing my fantasy was that I would write a bookof poems called “Healing Songs.” Because I saw the poetry as healing, deeply healing for me, and it was just brightening my day.
Veena Das in the final chapter of her now canonical 'Textures of the Ordinary' describes how she encountered these poems not as representations, but 'as the event itself':
When I first read these poems, I was struck by a curious feeling: the title that kept coming into my head, unbidden, was, “The Day Shelly Died,” but, of course, “The Day of Shelly’s Death” is what captures the event. It is not “the day Shelly died,” which might gesture to a pastness, to a memory. “The day of Shelly’s death” hits you with the force of a presence, for the day is everywhere, beyond and above the divisions of past, pre sent, and future. That day was prefigured in the omens and forebodings that are scattered all over the text, as well as the hints within moments ofher death that life will go on, that Renato will find love again, that the children will grow up, find other mothers, get married, find joy in their own children. Here one touches the uncanniness of ethnographic writing: one conveys that past from a point in one’s life when one is already in another time, a future-present. So in reading these poems, one occupies this double time— “Shelly’s death will happen / Shelly’s death has happened.”
And then there's this remarkable footnote in Das' text on the future-present:
In his notes in the Brown Book, Wittgenstein (1958) asks whether a feeling of pastness distinguishes memory images from other images. Yet when the anthropologist is writing up her text, the question of who she was at that time when the event she is describing “happened” is a difficult question to answer. In her nuanced interweaving of her own experience of a disastrous love afair with experiences she is recording of women with mental illness, Sarah Pinto conveys both the texture of the pre sent when she is in the field and the sense that the fieldwork experiences already belong to the past— a typical way time is experienced as we move between fieldwork and writing. I ofer the full quotation for its exquisite rendering of this experience of coevalness: “I will not know yet that time will bring, at first, less articulation and more dissolution, and then, not until years later, a new love who will offer kindness and sanity, overturning— easily, gracefully— every thing that I have come to fear is true about love and home, and much of what I write here” (Pinto 2014, 152). The future present of the narration performs the function of dispersing the narrator over a stretch of time diferent from that of the spectral present.
What is it then about narration, about the telling of stories that allows this distinction between the narrator dispersed across time and the spectral present.
Consider the case of datting apps like Hinge. Increasingly profiles on the app are becoming self-representative of the experiences of the user on the app. 'Third time around on hinge, not much hope this time either' a profile may read. The endless desire of human loneliness and immeasurable human grief is perhaps to be heard by the same punishing eternity that stretches in front of the eyes of the person that has faced loss.
However I feel there is an even more critical reading of these last passages by Das and Rosaldo: the by now conventional lesson 'The I is an other', not just that the I is split in some fundamental oedipal sense as Freud and Lacan would allow but rather it is subject upon investigation to endless splitting. Personhood in this sense, even in the ancient way of 'I am a person in my tribe', I find, is not a question of limiting or intergrating the individual but rather precisely of allowing the ephemeral its own expression.
This is what is most apparent in 'The Day of Shelley's death' the interweaving of the traumatic past into the passing ephemeral present. How does one deal with the haunting of every single moment of the everyday by a traumatic event? And moving past for a second the specific context of Rosaldo's exquisite work, what if one is nudged out of normalcy by something entirely pedestrian, something small. Consider works for example like 'The Pigeon' by Suskind and 'Michale Kolhaas' by Von Kleist?
It seems to me that this is precisely what our overreliance on frameworks of pre-modernity (the tribe) to define modern institutions did, we assumed collectivity, community and its inherent goodness, but we failed to see that all of these forms are contingent on time spent. What happens when our chances to have well built social ties are increasngly derascinated, do we then give up on a politics of futurity altogether? Doesn't loneliness too have a politics? Doesn't melancholia?
In all the name calling that seems to form the basis of economic capital in academic networks, perhaps nothing is reviled more than individuality, it is the individual that is fascist, it is the work motivated by the individual that is 'academic bullshit', and yet isn't fascism and bullshit precisely holding a false image of the past into a future that wants to have nothing to do with it?
Rosaldo is direct on this point in his piece 'Grief and the headhunter's rage'. He argues that grief itself cannot be studied as a 'social system', it is dependant on the closeness of the person to the object of grief.
The point isn't that community will disappear entirely, after all at least on the face of it fascist-capitalistic forms of sociality continue to harp on the 'community is above the individual', the entire Nazi metaphor of the bundle of sticks comes to mind. The point is that we have reified what community is and could be and in doing so severly limited the scope of the emergence of novel social and political configurations that can follow on and modify the therapeautic as a master social configuration.
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In the Day of Shelly's death Rosaldo writes a series of descriptive poems that begin with the events leading to Shelly's death and then moves backwards in time, expanding duration to move backwards and forwards in time around the tragedy. The poems draw out the landscape of the Illongot territory as one imbued with loss. He starts with biographical poems told from the perspective of individuals close to him in the field, like his brother in the tribe Tukbaw and his brother Taru, who was socially marginalized in the tribe. Each of these initial poems is told in the voice of the person it describes. Taru's poem reads full of loneliness and the bitterness that comes from alienation:
Oozing sores cover my body, no woman wants me.
No bachelor among us lives alone, my cousins take me in.
Already our nascent ideas about tribal peoples as purely communal are challenged, here we see all the melancholic subjectivity inherent in any urban milleu born from unrequited love and social alienation.
As the poems progress the seem to circle closer and closer to the event, but never quite reach there, for what is the event, in its pure form? Nothing. Nothing but a distributions of ephemeral effects. Here Rosaldo doesn't bother to write an ethnography that draws out vast formations of discourse or structures of the psyche, he describes instead the social as a collection of fleeting exchanges: single micro-events that linger on.
Another initial poem describes Tukbaw's wife, Wagat:
I’m married to Tukbaw, no children. He had none with Biya.
I’m a sour rattan fruit, forehead furrowed, tongue sharp.
Headhunting, is strewn across the poem, like everyday myth, like talk about one's immediate ancestors:
Nato asks for my stories, lets me finish each one.
I tell how the Butags beheaded my uncle
but my nephews beg me not to finish.
Another fragment:
I cannot bear the pain of my father’s failing.
He forgets when his nephews hear
of their grandfather’s beheading
their desire for vengeance grows severe.
It is as if in devastating and nearly fatal grief the ethnographer turns into a magnet for the same. The question isn't one of empathy, but as Das describes in the footnote I copied above, it is a question of coevalness.Pinto's devstating breakup in the field makes her coeval to her field, it makes her coeval not just to great grief, but the to brief ephemeral presence of melancholy and grief inside everything, inside the nature itself even.
Here we see a different sensiblity from measurement to grief, something beyond the therapeutic configuration: the ephemeral, which must be theorized not just as a wistful poetic possiblity, but as the grounds of a real future politics. If extimacy instrocudes vast chasms into the social fabric, and if the fabric is woven itself from time spent together, then we have to envision a future where this possiblity: prolonged time spent together, is increasingly derascinated. We must find the political structures commensurate with loneliness and social alienation, and these I believe rest in a politics of the ephemeral, the subject of the next post in this series.
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