Just as ritual is, by definition, a nonordinary sort of activity, so the understandings facilitated through participation in and observation of ritual activity bear a problematic relation to the ordinary organization of everyday life. The shock of “otherness” that I experienced in witnessing Ilongot reactions to a tape of a headhunting celebration is paralleled by the fact that Ilongots themselves only sometimes and in special contexts experience violence and disruptive ‘passion’ as a source of beauty and strength. For the fieldworker, equally puzzling and perhaps more disorienting are the things people say and do when neither anthropologist nor native sees the moment as marked or peculiar. It was precisely when life seemed most familiar and my friends and I appeared to share unself-conscious perceptions of our common world that the tone of a remark or its content called forth naive and confusing reflections on my part as to whether the people I was studying were or were not “like” myself.

So it was when we decided that I had a cold and should spend the day resting and warm. The very commonness of my symptoms, as well as the Ilongot insistence that Vicks VapoRub was the only medicine that could guarantee me any relief, seemed, at the time, to testify to the universal and objective nature of my complaint.