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4.17 AVERAGE
4.17 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
A poignant look into the author’s experience of grief and loss at a time of life growth & exploration. An interesting and unique perspective on losing your life partner, work mate and life trajectory whilst surrounded by a culture that processes grief trauma differently.
Enjoyed:
Enjoyed:
- the thorough delve into his own poetry, enabling the reader to understand his positioning
- the informative essay that followed. I learnt a lot about the practice of head hunting and the author’s understanding and lived experience of grief trauma, and how this led him to deepen his own understanding of the relation between grief and ilongot head hunting
- The various use of media; poetry, photographs, prose, infographics. This helped to paint a picture of the situation for someone who went into reading this book blind
- How personal the story was. I could really feel how cathartic this would’ve been for the author to write
Did not enjoy:
- The way the poetry of as written wasn’t my cup of tea; just not a fan of the lack of imagery
- The essays went on a slight tangent every now and again
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Murder
Holy shit, that was powerful. Beautiful collection of poetry as anthropology and ethnography. I actually kinda read it all backwards ("Grief and a Headhunter's Rage," then "Notes" then the actual poetry), and that actually made it better and more understandable for me (partially because I'm a theory nerd, but still).
dark
emotional
slow-paced
“These poems create deep feeling through the accumulation of concrete particulars rather than by beginning (as so many fine lyric poets do) with a named subjective state and elaborating through image and metaphor.”
“On a logical plane the doctrine of predestination seems flawless: God has chosen the elect but his decision can never be known by mortals. If a group’s ultimate concern is salvation, however, this coherent doctrine proves impossible to live with for all but the religious virtuoso. The problem of meaning, for Calvinists and Ilongots alike, involves practice, not theory. At stake for both groups are practical matters concerning how to live with one’s beliefs, rather than logical puzzlement produced by an abstract doctrine.”
“All interpretations are provisional; they are made by positioned subjects who are prepared to know certain things and not others. Good ethnographers, knowledgeable and sensitive, fluent in the language, and able to move easily in an alien cultural world, still have their limits. Their analyses are always incomplete.”
“On a logical plane the doctrine of predestination seems flawless: God has chosen the elect but his decision can never be known by mortals. If a group’s ultimate concern is salvation, however, this coherent doctrine proves impossible to live with for all but the religious virtuoso. The problem of meaning, for Calvinists and Ilongots alike, involves practice, not theory. At stake for both groups are practical matters concerning how to live with one’s beliefs, rather than logical puzzlement produced by an abstract doctrine.”
“All interpretations are provisional; they are made by positioned subjects who are prepared to know certain things and not others. Good ethnographers, knowledgeable and sensitive, fluent in the language, and able to move easily in an alien cultural world, still have their limits. Their analyses are always incomplete.”
This book was really hard to read for class considering the amount of grief and loss I've been dealing with in the last 2 years