Undoing: Social Suffering and the Politics of Remorse in the New South Africa

This article does not pretend to offer an anthropology of remorse, a field that does not exist and that I do not intend to invent here. The paucity of ethnographic references to remorse and forgiveness suggests either an appalling oversight by generations of anthropologists, or it could alert us to the modernist and Western nature of the concepts under consideration. Although anthropological references to vengeance, blood feuds, counter-sorcery, and witch-hunts are many, descriptions of individual or collective rituals of remorse and reparation are few indeed. At the heart of this lacuna are the culturally specific meanings and experiences of "basic" emotions - like grief, rage, and remorse - often thought to be universally shared. Earlier generations of anthropologists invoked a shaky dichotomy between guilt and shame oriented societies (see Benedict, 1946; Doi, 1973; Lebra, 1971). The experience of deeply personal and internalized feelings of responsibility, guilt, and remorse- as distinguished from public spectacles of confession driven by more externalized social sentiments of blaming and shaming - were assumed to be weakly developed or absent in many non-Western societies. Remorse presupposes the existence of a certain kind of Western "civilized" or "cultivated" self (see Foucault, 1986; Elias, 1978), a culturally produced "self" that was acutely self-conscious, highly individuated, autonomous, reflexive, and brooding- a prototypical Hamlet figure, if you will, overly preoccupied by a guilty, confessional conscience. Think, for example, of the overly scrupulous Irish Catholic conscience captured by James Joyce in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and you have it. Consider, however, the almost gleefully, shamelessly, unrepentant, headhunting Ilongot warriors of northern Luzon, Philippines, studied by Michelle Rosaldo (1980, 1983) and Renato Rosaldo (1980, 1985), and you have something very different. An older Ilongot man explained to Renato Rosaldo that the practice of severing and "tossing away" a victim's head enabled Ilongot males to "toss away" their anger following the death of a loved one. Instead of a "mourning" complex of depression, inaction, guilt, resentful anger, and remorse, the Ilongot ethno-psychiatry of mourning was built around an emotional complex of excitement, exhilaration, hyperactivity, and murderous, indeed, even gleeful rage. The Ilongot "self" is described as relatively undifferentiated, decidedly nonautonomous, and contained within an alternative moral/ethical system. To Renato Rosaldo's perplexity, his Ilongot informants denied any "rational" basis for their guilt-free headhunting practices. It was not motivated, for example, by ideas about social exchange such that one death (or one head) might cancel the death of another. No, headhunting, the Ilongots insisted, was about the enjoyment of it alone. Taking a stranger' s head "lightened" the weight of a personal loss, just as their head-hunting war songs made Ilongot feel happy, calm, and at peace with the world. It took Rosaldo another decade and the tragic experience of his own wife's death in the field to overcome his cultural resistance to the Ilongot ethno-psychology of emotions. Following Shelly Rosaldo's accidental death, Ilongot emotions finally made sense to him, not because they conformed to a universal psychological script of mourning, but rather because he had absorbed a culturally distinct aspect of Ilongot ways of experiencing emotions and the self. The Ilongots' unforgiving - we could almost say remorseless - way of grieving became tragically available to him. Renato knew - or thought he knew - what it felt like to want to angrily, gleefully, take a head and to toss it away in order to toss off, as it were, the weight of profound grief. Like Rosaldo, I, too, resisted for a very long time accepting at face value what impoverished Northeast Brazilian women told me about their lack of grief, regret, or remorse accompanying the frequent deaths of their young infants- deaths they sometimes aided and abated by reducing or withdrawing food and liquids to babies seen as "doomed," in any case. …