Renato Rosaldo

In 2003, Rosaldo left Stanford to teach at New York University. He is a New York Institute for the Humanities Fellow.

He has also published four volumes of poetry. The first, Prayer to Spider Woman/Rezo a la mujer araña (Rosaldo 2003) in Spanish and English, won an American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation. The second, Diego Luna’s Insider Tips (2012) won the Many Mountains Moving book manuscript contest for 2009. The Day of Shelly’s Death appeared in 2014, and The Chasers in 2019. Rosaldo's poetry has also appeared in Bilingual Review, Many Mountains Moving, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, Texas Observer. He has coined the term antropoeta to describe his movement between anthropology and poetry.

He is also the editor of Creativity/Anthropology (with Smadar Lavie and Kirin Narayan) (1993), Anthropology of Globalization (with Jon Inda) (2001), and Cultural Citizenship in Island Southeast Asia: National and Belonging in the Hinterlands (2003), among other books.

Rosaldo conducted research on cultural citizenship in San Jose, California from 1989–1998, and he contributed the introduction and an article to Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights (1997). He is also a poet and has published four volumes of poetry, most recently The Chasers (2019).

Rosaldo joined the Stanford University anthropology faculty in 1970. He became the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences (emeritus).

Rosaldo entered Harvard University in 1959, taking classes in anthropology, Spanish history and literature. His teachers included Beatrice Whiting and Laura Nader. Rosaldo graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in Spanish History and Literature in 1963. He spent a year, 1963–1964, in Spain but saw no future for Spanish scholarship under Francisco Franco. Returning to Harvard, Rosaldo studied Social Anthropology, receiving his Ph.D. in 1971 for his work in the Philippines on Ilongot social organization.

He was married to anthropologist Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo (1944–1981). He is currently married to Mary Louise Pratt, a scholar of Latin American Studies and Comparative Literature. He has three children (Sam, Manuel, and Olivia), and three grandchildren.

Renato Rosaldo (born 1941) is an American cultural anthropologist. He has done field research among the Ilongots of northern Luzon, Philippines, and he is the author of Ilongot Headhunting: 1883–1974: A Study in Society and History (1980) and Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (1989).

Renato Rosaldo was born on April 15, 1941 in Champaign, Illinois, USA. At a young age, Rosaldo spoke Spanish with his Mexican father and English with his Anglo mother. When he was four, his family moved to Madison, Wisconsin where his father taught Mexican and Latin American literature at the University of Wisconsin. When he was twelve, they moved to Tucson, Arizona, where his father taught in the Spanish department at the University of Arizona. Rosaldo attended Tucson High School where he became a member of a "social club" called The Chasers, about which he later wrote an eponymous book of poetry. Living in different cultural settings during his formative years, Rosaldo had to learn and relearn el trato, the interactional social contract underlying participation in social life, "how to treat other guys and girls".

Rosaldo's published anthropological works include: Ilongot Headhunting, 1883–1974: A Study in Society and History (1980); Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (1989); The Inca and Aztec States, 1400–1800: Anthropology and History co-edited, (1982); Anthropology/Creativity (1993); and The Anthropology of Globalization (2001)