Something Beautiful

Understanding Grief Within a Cultural Context

I wrote and recorded a poem then spliced and interspersed it with the recorded interview I did with Robin Brilz (Director of Fair Mount heritage foundation). The interview was conducted at the cemetery, where I got a hands-on and intimate understanding of the processes that Robin has seen concerning grief and mourning on the grounds. I then took the audio and adapted that to a video created through the software Adobe Premiere Pro. The goal of the project was to display personal and impersonal moments highlighting grief; as an extension of honoring the process of grieving my father. It was my intention to encourage the idea that grief is a bucket full of emotions and when felt no matter the cultural context they should be felt and expressed. I was influenced by Renato Rosaldo’s work ‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’, on grief expressed as rage in the Ilongot community in the Philippines. In the ethnography, Rosaldo understands how and why the Ilongot expresses grief strongly through rage, through his own experiences with grief during the making of the ethnography. Analysis of grief in another culture gave him the framework to understand his emotions in another culture’s context (I attempted this on a small scale in my interview). Renato Rosaldo was concerned that many studies of death did not consider emotions after a ritual, for instance, consider someone’s cultural position when discussing grief. Similarly, I am heartened by the processes after rituals, and connecting on a deeper level as Renato did going through his emotions and feeling them. I was also influenced by G.S, Silvermans (2020) understanding of ontologies of the dead, where she presents ethnography when studying the end-of-life and the mourning that follows can be both an emotionally uncomfortable, but intellectually productive in order to create a shared and prosperous environment for healing for a range of grief responses.

References:
Renato Rosaldo
1989 Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage. In Anthropological Theory for the[OM3] Twenty-First Century: A Critical Approach. Augusta L. Bolles, Ruth Gombere-Muñoz, Bernard C. Perley, and Keri Vacanti Brondo, eds. Toronto, University of Toronto Press.

Silverman, G. S., Baroiller, A., & Hemer, S. R.
2020 Culture and grief: Ethnographic perspectives on ritual, relationships and remembering. Death Studies, 45(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2020.1851885

Key terms and definitions:

Death
The cause or occasion of loss of life.
Grief
Grief is the feeling and emotional response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or some living thing that has died, to which a bond or affection was formed.
Cultural Norms
Rules or expectations of behavior and thoughts based on shared beliefs within a specific cultural or social group.
Ontology
In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions of how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exist in the most fundamental level.