On the ethnographic antonyms of loss and change: Review of Death of the One Who Knows

Death of the One Who Knows—or, as the original French title, Quand un poète disparaît, more aptly suggests—is a beautiful ethnographic and nearly lyrical meditation around loss. In this powerful documentary, ethnomusicologist Dana Rappoport masterfully attends to the intricacies of our experience with loss, understood here both as an existential event (i.e., the severing of intimate intersubjective entanglements ensuing from an individual’s death) and as a collective and systemic phenomenon (i.e., the structural displacement and social discontents emerging from processes of cultural and linguistic shift).