ABSTRACT
In 1974, Renato and Michelle Rosaldo returned to the Philippines, where four years earlier they had been carrying out fieldwork among the Ilongot, forest-dwelling shifting cultivators and headhunters. Their Ilongot friends were very keen to listen to the tapes of headhunting songs that the couple had recorded in the late 1960s. And yet,
‘Insan – one of our most loyal friends, and an insistent pleader for the old recording – snapped brusquely at me to turn the tape off just moments after I had turned it on. No eyes explained themselves as I obeyed – and found myself confused, annoyed, perplexed, and even angry. . . . (L)ater in the day, when guests had gone and we were alone with people we considered our true friends and ‘kin’, I asked ‘Insan to recall the morning’s drama. I found I had spent the day with feelings of indignant hurt – and so demanded an account of his abrupt command. . . . I saw that ‘Insan’s eyes were red. Tukbaw, Renato’s Ilongot ‘brother’, then broke into what was brittle silence, saying he could make things clear. He told us that it hurt to listen to a headhunting celebration when people knew there would never be another. As he put it: ‘The song pulls at us, drags our hearts, makes us think of our dead uncle’. And again: ‘It would be different if I had accepted God, but I still am an Ilongot at heart; and when I hear the song, my heart aches as it does when I must look at unfinished bachelors whom I know I will never lead to take a head’. Then Wagat, Tukbaw’s wife, said with her eyes that all my questions gave her pain, and told me: ‘Leave off now, isn’t that enough? Even I, a woman, cannot stand the way it feels inside my heart!’
