Renato Ignacio Rosaldo, one of the most influential cultural anthropologists of the twentieth century and an award-winning bilingual poet, died on May 26, 2026, in Manhattan. He was 85.

Born on April 15, 1941, in Champaign, Illinois, Rosaldo came into the world at a crossroads of languages and identities. His father, Renato Rosaldo Sr., was a Mexican immigrant completing a doctorate in Latin American literature at the University of Illinois; his mother, Betty Potter Rosaldo, was Anglo-American. Growing up speaking Spanish at one shoulder and English at the other, he absorbed early the lesson that borders were not walls but territories alive with meaning. He carried that lesson through a distinguished career that transformed how scholars think about culture, grief, and the politics of belonging.

Rosaldo enrolled at Harvard College, graduating in 1963 with an A.B. in Spanish history and literature, then returned to Harvard for doctoral study in social anthropology. Between 1967 and 1969, he and his first wife, fellow anthropologist Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, traveled to northern Luzon in the Philippines to live among the Ilongot people. He gathered the historical and ethnographic materials that would become his first major book, Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History (Stanford University Press, 1980). Michelle studied Ilongot concepts of emotion. Together they formed one of academic anthropology's great intellectual partnerships.

In October 1981, that partnership was shattered. While on a return visit to the Philippines with their two young sons, Michelle lost her footing and fell some sixty feet from a cliff into a swollen river. She did not survive. Rosaldo was left to grieve in a place he knew intimately but in a manner that no prior fieldwork had equipped him to understand. His 1984 essay "Grief and the Headhunter's Rage" was the result: a spare, courageous account of how personal devastation had finally made legible to him something the Ilongot had told him for years. They said that headhunting was driven by a rage born of grief; only now, from the inside of that rage, could he hear them. The essay became one of the most-read and taught pieces in the history of the discipline, and its central argument, that emotion is not noise to be filtered out of ethnographic analysis but evidence that must be taken seriously, reshaped the field.

His 1989 book Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Beacon Press) extended the argument into a full reckoning with the conventions of scholarly authority. Where earlier generations of anthropologists had aspired to an authoritative, distanced voice that spoke for whole peoples, Rosaldo insisted on transparency about the researcher's own position, history, and emotion. The book arrived at a moment when literary theory, feminist scholarship, and postcolonial critique were already pressing on those same conventions, and it became a touchstone for what came to be called the interpretive or reflexive turn in American anthropology.

Through thirty-three years at Stanford, where he held the endowed Lucie Stern Professorship in the Social Sciences, Rosaldo built a parallel commitment to Chicano and Latino studies. He directed the Stanford Center for Chicano Research from 1985 to 1990 and chaired the Department of Anthropology from 1994 to 1996. Beginning in 1989, he led the San Jose Cultural Citizenship Project, which sent researchers into minority communities across that California city to document how Vietnamese American, Filipino American, Native American, and Mexican American residents experienced, claimed, and negotiated belonging. The project produced the edited volume Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights (1997) and helped establish "cultural citizenship" as a concept in both scholarly and policy discussions. He served as president of the American Ethnological Society from 1991 to 1995 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997.

In 2003, Rosaldo moved to New York University to become the inaugural director of its Latino Studies program, a position that reflected the scope of his influence beyond any single discipline. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Social Sciences, recognizing a body of work that had traveled far beyond the boundaries of anthropology into cultural studies, Chicana/o literary criticism, and comparative ethnic studies.

Poetry came to Rosaldo through loss, as so much in his life had. After suffering a stroke in 1996, he turned to verse during his recovery and discovered a second voice. His bilingual debut collection, Prayer to Spider Woman / Rezo a la mujer araña, with Spanish and English on facing pages, won the American Book Award in 2004 from the Before Columbus Foundation. His second collection, Diego Luna's Insider Tips (2012), took the Many Mountains Moving poetry book manuscript prize, selected by poet Martin Espada. Duke University Press brought out The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief in 2013, a book that returned to October 1981 through the medium of verse, recreating the event and its aftermath from multiple perspectives. Then came The Chasers (2019), a chorus of poems inhabiting twelve Mexican American friends from Tucson High School, their voices carrying seven decades of borderlands life from the 1950s through the present. Sandra Cisneros called the collection "wise and funny and heartbreaking and moving." A fifth collection, Into the World Outspread: Notes from a Walker, rounded out a poetic output that matched in ambition the scholarly record accumulated over five decades.

His editor at Duke University Press, Gisela Fosado, described him as "a brilliant author but also deeply humble and kind." The poet Margaret Randall wrote that "Renato's voice is unique, authentic and alive."

He married Mary Louise Pratt on November 26, 1983. Pratt, a comparative literature scholar and Silver Professor at NYU, was also a Duke University Press author, and the two sustained a shared intellectual life even as their careers followed separate but often overlapping paths. Rosaldo was survived by Pratt, his two sons Samuel Mario and Manuel Zimbalist Rosaldo, and three grandchildren.

The arc of Renato Rosaldo's work traced a consistent belief: that the edges of things, the borders between languages, nations, disciplines, and grief and understanding, are not margins to be overlooked but centers of human experience. He demonstrated, across a career that spanned fieldwork in the Philippine highlands and poetry written during a stroke recovery in New York, that rigorous scholarship and personal honesty are not in conflict. They are, at their best, the same thing. His books remain in syllabi across the world. His voice, as Margaret Randall wrote, endures.