The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart

by Ruth Behar

Overview

The 25th-anniversary edition of the groundbreaking book that changed anthropology, asserting that ethnographers needn’t exclude themselves or their vulnerabilities from their work

In a new epilogue to this classic work, renowned ethnographer and storyteller Ruth Behar reflects on the groundbreaking impact The Vulnerable Observer has had on anthropology, sociology, and psychology and on scholarly writing. A pocket companion for writers, journalists, documentarians, and activists alike, this book speaks to the power of including oneself in the story, bringing deeper meaning to the relationship between writer, subject, and reader.

In a move revolutionary for its time, The Vulnerable Observer proposed a new theory and practice for humanistic anthropology. No longer should ethnographers write at a distance, clad in their shroud of “objectivity.” In six luminous essays, Behar calls instead for a fresh approach to ethnography, one that is lived and written more openly. Through this very personal account, readers can travel and relate to other peoples and the world around them.

Eloquently interweaving ethnography and memoir, Behar encourages her readers to be open about their experiences, as open as their subjects are with them. She does so in the hope that this work will lead us toward greater depth of understanding and feeling, not only in anthropology but in all efforts to document the shared vulnerability of the observed and the observer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807007136
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	11/15/2022
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	1,034,802
Product dimensions:	5.39(w) x 7.98(h) x 0.45(d)

About the Author

Ruth Behar—ethnographer, novelist, poet, and filmmaker—is the James W. Fernandez Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. The recipient of two Fulbright Awards, a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, she was named a “Great Immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Behar is the author of several works of ethnography, including Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story and Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in Between Journeys, and the coming-of-age novels Lucky Broken Girl and Letters from Cuba. Born in Havana, she grew up in New York and has also lived in Spain and Mexico. Today she lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 The Vulnerable Observer 1

Chapter 2 Death and Memory: From Santa María del Monte to Miami Beach 34

Chapter 3 My Mexican Friend Marta Who Lives across the Border from Me in Detroit 91

Chapter 4 The Girl in the Cast 105

Chapter 5 Going to Cuba: Writing Ethnography of Diaspora, Return, and Despair 137

Chapter 6 Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart 162

Chapter 7 The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart 179

Acknowledgments 192

Notes 194

Index 206

Editorial Reviews

As ‘a woman of the border’ . . . [Behar] infuses her vision with insight, candor and compassion.”
—Diane Cole, The New York Times Book Review

“Behar has convinced me that ethnographic empathy will produce an anthropology that has greater meaning than the distanced and detached academic anthropology of the past.”
—Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe

From the Publisher

Whether anthropology is your thing or not, Ruth Behar has issues in mind that may be too provocative to pass up. Behar, a Cuban-born Jew who teaches at the University of Michigan, is a champion of a relatively new form of anthropology that seems to be driving the fuddy-duddies in academia nuts. Combine traditional fieldwork with a researcher's personal experience, she asserts, and you come up with a mode of study that informs the intellect as it grips the emotions ù without smashing the delicate subject(s) flat, the way conventional research often does. It takes an extremely clear-eyed and self-critical writer to get an enterprise like this off the ground, and Behar is one of the very few who can swing it.

The Vulnerable Observer is tough going at first, since its six essays are so arbitrarily arranged it seems as if the book was structured backwards. First Behar ponderously defends her case, then she submits her four examples of "vulnerable" anthropological writing, and finally, she gets around to explaining in plain English what critics' objections to her methods have been. Getting into this book is like yanking a stubborn cork out of a bottle: Once the heavy work is done, the rewards are there for leisurely sampling.

In "Death and Memory," which directly follows Behar's ponderous intro, the wine is good indeed. This sprawling essay has Behar touching down in a Spanish village populated almost exclusively by old people. She gathers her elderly subjects' perceptions of what death means even as she frets helplessly about her frail, lonely Cuban/Jewish grandfather back in Miami. Her own protective instincts aroused, Behar gets bold enough to make the prospect of death majestic and frightening. By the time she returns to Florida to sit shivah for her Zayde, you'll probably be in tears.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book doesn't have the same intellectual or emotional wallop. The next four essays, one of which describes an automobile accident that landed the author in a body cast at age 9, are badly unbalanced by the hip lit-crit buzzwords that permeate this book. Like many academicians, Behar can't put fingers to keyboard without yakking about "texts," making occasional (and, luckily, half-hearted) references to "Otherness," or starting paragraphs with "This essay is about ..." ù all post-structuralist devices that stop the imaginative process dead in its tracks. And, yes, Behar proves that anthropology can make you cry, but changing her delicate science from a self/other exploration into a self/self trip sometimes strains logic. Sheer solipsism won't cure cultural anxiety, but the constant negotiation between the impulse to objectify and the impulse to embrace might relieve some of the ache. -- Salon

Sally Eckhoff

"...Ruth Behar tries to bridge the gap between the worlds of the academic and general reader, opening up both her discipline and her own motives to scrutiny....[She] subtitles her book Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. From the outset she defines her project as a search for a stil new genre, one that "mix[es] the person with the ethnographic" by trying to include both the observer and the observed as subjects. As she moves from essay to essay the link is her continued attention to this question and how it resurfaces in her work.....While all Behar's attempts to give each perspective space in her essays may not be seamless, her project is articulated well and engages the general reader as well as the professional anthropologist." -- The Women's Review of Books

Linda Niemann

These readable, insightful essays are linked by the tension between the traditional academic view of anthropology as objective science and accomplished anthropologist Behar's (Univ. of Michigan) desire to admit the subjectivity, or "vulnerability," that often plays a role in the work.

One piece describes Behar's ambivalence about leaving her dying grandfather to do fieldwork on culture and death in a small village in Spain. There are touching remembrances of her grandfather, interesting meditations on the aging town of Santa Maria, and reflections on how the author's musings on her grandfather's death increased her understanding of Santa Maria's death rituals. Instead of striving for an unattainable objectivity in her studies, Behar owns up to her emotional baggage, airs it out, and uses it to her advantage. Another essay, perhaps the most compelling, describes her harrowing experience in a car accident that killed five people. The author, then nine years old, spent months immobilized in a body cast. Chastised for complaining, she buried her emotions, which resurfaced in adult life as sudden and crippling agoraphobia. Other essays address Behar's complex relationship with the state of Cuba (she is a Cuban Jew by birth), and how class and other factors form borders even when political borders are not imposed. In the last essay, a defense of "anthropology that breaks your heart," Behar describes a conference at which she defended her methods. Excerpts from her speech are interspersed with her thoughts at the time to create a complex, challenging piece.

But the argument between objective and subjective views of anthropology is not completed in these pages. Ultimately, Behar's writings here are more personal essay than anthropological study, failing to clarify the application of her notion of anthropology that breaks your heart.

Kirkus Reviews