On Somatics: Not Discarding the Body

Rosaldo's Grief and a Headhunter's Rage says something to my thoughts on the 5 Excellences. His understanding of the headhunters' practices required a lived experience of the words he heard from the informants. His informants on headhunting were responding to their grief, which he thought of as deep sadness, until Rosaldo himself experienced grief. When he felt the rage of grief he could then understand that headhunters were venting this aspect of grief when capturing their prey, murdering them, and discarding their heads. The word rage hadn't stood out in their informant's data until he was a respondent to his own analysis of the grief he felt over his brother's death and then his wife's. He now held visceral knowledge of grief and its many flavors; how it shocks one's being and produces profound experiences that can then be made into profound meaning. Relating this to his data on headhunters brought in a wider range of possibility in the importance of headhunting as a response to grief.

The depth of experience required to empathize with the headhunters is frightening. Such a sacrifice was made (though not intentional) to have to experience the grief of losing his wife in order to have insight into headhunters' rage. And to have that rage now speak to the headhunters' need for that particular social institution in response to what we now imagine is a general human experience of overwhelming grief. The word grief lived in his mind before he experienced it in his body. If we think of it as a character, like the Chinese written word, we might now see anger in the chi of his calligraphy. What his body felt mingled with the word in his mind and became expressed in his meditation on Grief and a Headhunter's Rage.

The headhunter, in his rage, discards the head. They do so to relive themselves of unbearable grief. Damasio suggests that we cannot discard our emotions when considering our decision making and those other parts of our actions. This includes analysis. Rosaldo had to feel grief in his body to understand why the headhunters sought out and then discarded heads. When we discard the body, the experience of being in the world, for the theories in our heads we lose a range of knowing what it is to be human. We need not be headhunters to have insight into why one would hunt heads. We do need to be present to our own specific body to understand words and and other expressions of what it is to be human in other bodies that expresses themselves in other forms.