Overcoming Limits of Interpreting Cultural Diversity

Overcoming Limits of Interpreting Cultural Diversity            In the description of a cultural anthropologist, Kottak (n.d) contends that ethnographic fieldwork involves practitioners spending a significant amount of time in another society and is a critical process that facilitates learning ways of life of the locals. Malinowski (n.d) also purports that ethnological studies on native races have increasingly demanded a scientific and methodological inquiry in reproducing sufficient and high-quality research. From such methods, students and scholars can draw important conclusions about the origin of human beliefs, spread, conscience, and law in societies. Methodological approaches deficient in inquiry often fail highly trained academicians to study inhabitants in their savage worlds (Malinowski, n.d). Given the significance of methodological and scientific inquiry, this paper presents a critical analysis of “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” by Rosaldo (1993) and Geertz’s (2005) “Deep Play” and how they attempt to overcome limits of interpreting cultural diversity through ethnographic research methods.
           Both Rosaldo (1993) and Geertz (2005) begin their articles by describing the nature and experiences of their ethnographic fieldwork in respective indigenous populations. Rosaldo (1993) writes about the Ilongot population notoriously known for chopping off human heads due to bereavement griefs. The Ilongot community is located in northern Luzon in the Philippines where the scholar seeks to find answers to the motivations of older Ilungot men cutting off human heads after losing their loved ones. While at first, the scholar fails to understand the reasons for such a practice, spending time with the community presents the realities or the “emotional force of death” that even modern Christianity fails to recompense (Rosaldo, 1993). Geertz (2005) travels in the company of his wife to a remote village in Balinese in early April 1958. As anthropologists, they are interested in understanding the cultural significance of cocks and cockfights as idolized among the villagers. As depicted in the introduction of the articles, Rosaldo (1993) and Geertz (2005) describe their encounters with the local villagers as part of ethnographic fieldwork before revealing their findings. 
           While Rosaldo (1993) and Geertz (2005) find the cultural practices in the host villages strange, the anthropologists finally learn to appreciate the differences. However, as Kottak (n.d) states, no matter how longer anthropologists learn about the foreign culture, they will remain aliens but still learn to respect other people’s beliefs and customs as part of wider global society. During his first encounter with the Ilongot culture of beheading people due to bereavement grief, Rosa...