ABSTRACT
In 1974, Renato and Michelle Rosaldo returned to the Philippines, where four years earlier they had been carrying out fieldwork among Ilongot people, forest-dwelling shifting cultivators and headhunters. Accounts of the immediate are omnipresent in ethnographic writing and also extremely diverse. Whereas some ethnographers use narratives of the immediate to support positivistic and/or normative explanations of society and culture, others concentrate on the partial and provisional character of ethnographic interpretations. This chapter discusses how accounts of the immediate in ethnography are interlinked with the ethnographer’s theoretical. An emotionally and imaginatively compelling description, then, furthers and facilitates a convincing interpretation – which, in anthropology, always is built around modelling and abstracting. In Veiled Sentiments this connection between powerful narrative of the immediate and persuasive theoretical construct becomes strikingly visible when Lila Abu-Lughod’s explains how the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouins, challenge the dominant gender ideology that dictates the autonomy of men and the dependence of women.
