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A review by fionayin
The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief by Renato Rosaldo
4.0
“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.”