The podcast framing implies that Renato Rosaldo, because he learned about the Ilongot emotion of liget, experienced his grief in a more "raw," "primitive," "environmentally attuned," and perhaps "communal" way (than had he experienced it solely through English-language grief)—rather than highlighting his main point above: that being familiar with liget allowed him to recognize the deep anger that was part of his grieving experience

1. So, was the aim of his written piece mainly to showcase his own emotional learning?

Brendan: In these examples, Rosaldo discusses his personal feelings in detail. I am not opposed to having personal feelings or beliefs in one's writing, but I read his pieces as texts that explore the author's personal grief through research, one in which he is in an etic (and I'd argue colonial, too) position with respect to these Indigenous people of the Philippines... [A]lthough the author is Latinx and involved with social justice work via research, what I have mentioned above makes me interpret the statements as American vs. Other... Within these Indigenous Filipinx cultures, the author finds solace and what he was “missing” in his explorations of grief... To what extent can a researcher personally benefit from his research and involve one’s personal life in research?

2. Or was he trying to make a theoretical point about the universality of emotion?

Derrick: Are emotions universal? (☞ Aidan and Sage: The language relativity hypothesis does partially describe how people experience emotions, but it fails to capture the innate ability in humans to experience emotion.)

Or, alternatively, was he trying to teach everyone about the cultural specificity of liget among the Ilongot? But, if he was trying to contextualize and legitimize liget, wouldn't it have been better to do so within its own Ilongot cultural and historical context, rather than with a superficial analogy to "middle-class American grief" (which sets up an all-too-easy conclusion of "violent Ilongot" vs. "non-violent Americans"/"communal Ilongot" vs. "individualistic Americans," etc.)?

Mackenzie: How do we as researchers navigate the pervasive problem of “Othering” that shows up in academia? How do we engage with and learn from communities, particularly vulnerable communities? What are the boundaries of accessing, experiencing and sharing that knowledge?

☞ e.g., Example of how two outside anthropologists with good intentions led to a single cultural practice coming to stand—in a synecdochic way—for a whole group of people, and treacherously: When anthropologists Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff wrote Slavery in Africa: Historical and anthropological perspectives, in 1980, they wrote to dismantle the scholarly argument according to which "domestic slavery" laid the groundwork for trans-Atlantic slavery. Thus, they characterized African servitude as a form of "benign slavery" involving kin-like relations. However, the very word "slavery" still involved a facile comparison to merchant slavery (e.g., trans-Atlantic slavery). This then resulted in literature that generalized servitude in this one part of West African social structure to West African society writ large (viz., West African kinship practices involve servile relations between kin members).