Renato Rosaldo is from a generation of anthropologists often referred to as post-modern or post-modernist. Some anthropologists who hew to a more traditional, quantified, and presumably scientific approach to the study of cultures have criticized post-modernists for being subjective rather than objective, but in this piece Rosaldo presents an argument that the lived experience of the ethnographer can make a significant contribution to his or her understanding of the motivational factors at play in the culture he or she is studying. Can the subjective feelings of an observer help to produce objective knowledge or is the fact that such emotional experience is non-reproducable mean that it can't truly be trusted? A second line of inquiry for us will be his discussion of the gap between meaning and subjectivity (experience) within ritual, versus the ethnographic discussion of ritual practice.
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