The Day of Shelly's Death Quotes

“The notion of [emotional] force, among other things, opens to question the common assumption that the greatest human import always resides in the densest forest of symbols and that cultural depth always equals cultural elaboration. Do people always, in fact, describe most thickly what to them matters most?”
― Renato Rosaldo, The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief

“Antropoesía is a process of discovery more than a confirmation of the already known. If one knows precisely where a poem is going before beginning to write there is no point in going further. The same can be said of thick description in ethnography where theory is to be discovered in the details. The details inspire theory rather than illustrate already formulated theory. Like an ethnographer, the antropoeta looks and looks, listens and listens, until she sees or hears what she did not apprehend at first.”
― Renato Rosaldo, The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief