Death, Emotions, and Social Change among the Austronesian-Speaking Bunun of Taiwan

Abstract

Focusing on the analysis of mortuary rites, this article explores how the Bunun, an Austronesian-speaking indigenous people of Taiwan, conceptualize and deal with death in particular historical contexts. It suggests that death rituals should not be treated as self-contained wholes or closed symbolic systems but as busy intersections of multiple social processes. The paper examines how colonial policies and the introduction of Christianity have transformed the ways in which death is dealt with among the Bunun, and how they continue to pose questions on how to deal with rage in grief for this formerly headhunting group by producing hesitations and disagreements over the moral and social propriety of alternative ritual forms. When the consequences of social change are taken seriously, the extent to which ritual forms organize and shape the experience of mourning needs to be reconsidered. In his heartrending article "Grief and a Headhunter's Rage" [1989], Renato Rosaldo relates how his devastating personal loss enabled him to understand the Ilongot experience of bereavement and the cultural force of emotions. At the time of his fieldwork, he brushed aside Ilongot men's brief statements that the rage in grief impelled them to headhunt as too simple, thin, opaque, implausible, or unsatisfying, and attempted to find a "deeper" explanation for headhunting. Only when he found rage in the bereavement caused by his wife Michelle Rosaldo's accidental death in 1981 was he better able to grasp the force of grieving Ilongot men's desire to vent their rage. Although Ilongot anger and the author's own overlap, they are not identical. Alongside striking similarities, significant differences in tone, cultural form, and human consequences distinguish the "anger" animating the respective ways of grieving. The emotions aroused at the time of death have drawn the attention of anthropologists since the seminal works of Émile Durkheim [1995] and Robert Hertz [1960]. Their works highlighted the socially constructed nature of emotions, and successfully challenged the psychological assumption that emotions