Duke University Press The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief

This deeply moving collection of poetry by Renato Rosaldo focuses on the shock of his wife Michelle (Shelly) Rosaldo's sudden death on October 11, 1981. Just the day before, Shelly and her family had arrived in the northern Philippine village of Mungayang, where she and her husband Renato, both accomplished anthropologists, planned to conduct fieldwork. On October 11, Shelly died after losing her footing and falling some sixty feet from a cliff into a swollen river. Renato Rosaldo explored the relationship between bereavement and rage in his canonical essay, "Grief and a Headhunter's Rage," which first appeared in 1984 and is reprinted here. In the poems at the heart of this book, he returns to the trauma of Shelly's death through the medium of free verse, maintaining a tight focus on the events of October 11, 1981. He explores not only his own experience of Shelly's death but also the imagined perspectives of many others whose lives intersected with that tragic event and its immediate aftermath, from Shelly herself to the cliff from which she fell, from the two young boys who lost their mother to the strangers who carried and cared for them, from a tricycle taxi driver, to a soldier, to priests and nuns. Photographs taken years earlier, when Renato and Shelly were conducting research across the river valley from Mungayang, add a stark beauty. In a new essay, "Notes on Poetry and Ethnography," Rosaldo explains how and why he came to write the harrowing yet beautiful poems in The Day of Shelly's Death. More than anything else though, the essay is a manifesto in support of what he calls antropoesía, verse with an ethnographic sensibility. The essay clarifies how this book of rare humanity and insight challenges the limits of ethnography as it is usually practiced. Review "[A] wise, beautiful, and moving testimony to the power of Rosaldo's distinctive form of poetic inquiry. It opens salient dimensions of the emotional, social, and political worlds that the family occupied during their two months in the Philippines in 1981. And it provokes deep meditation about life, death, and our connections to one another."--Jane Monnig Atkinson "Anthropological Quarterly" "A sophisticated meditation on memory. It's a meditation that takes for granted the potential of alternative modes of inquiry to investigate the past (modes that square, I should note, with his ethnographic research). . . . Rosaldo laboriously retraces the ground of his research. The same characters we meet in his academic publications reappear, as he skillfully interweaves the narratives of his subjects--mostly Ilongot peoples, mediated more soberly in his scholarly texts--with the sudden shock of grief. Violence hovers in his words."--Luke A. Fidler "Economy" "Anyone interested in the social sciences could stand to benefit from reading this brief, yet insightful, book as Renato's poetry shows an innovative way of expressing what is often missing from traditional ethnographies. Finally, the avid reader of poetry find great value in how Rosaldo maximises the emotional impact of the situation with his laconic verse."--Kyle W. West "Centre for Medical Humanities" "This is genre-bending in the most meaningful sense of the term, not because the author wanted to explore his subject matter in a variety of genres but because he has expertise in a number of fields, and that expertise very naturally rose to the surface here. Dealing with loss is very much about memory. The Day of Shelly's Death remembers. And it re-members, that is, it reconnects the pieces of broken, fragmented experience."--Margaret Randall "World Literature Today" "This text is revolutionary; it presents another way, a new way of making poetry matter." --Juan Felipe Herrera "Los Angeles Review of Books" About the Author Renato Rosaldo is Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Scienc