The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart

(Paperback)

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Description

Eloquently interweaving ethnography and memoir, award-winning anthropologist Ruth Behar offers a new theory and practice for humanistic anthropology. She proposes an anthropology that is lived and written in a personal voice. She does so in the hope that it will lead us toward greater depth of understanding and feeling, not only in contemporary anthropology, but in all acts of witnessing.

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

Author Bio

Ruth Behar-ethnographer, traveler, novelist, poet and filmmaker-is professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. The recipient of a Fulbright Award, a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, among many others, Behar was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of several memoirs and novels, includingLucky Broken Girl andAn Island Called Home. Born in Havana, Cuba, she grew up in New York, and has also lived in Spain and Mexico. Today she lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.