VULNERABLE OBSERVER - Hardcover

Behar, Ruth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807046302 ISBN 13: 9780807046302

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 1996

Synopsis

Behar (anthropology, U. of Michigan-Ann Arbor) challenges the idea of objectivity and impersonality in research, blending ethnography with memoir in an account of her own fieldwork in Spain, Cuba, and the US, placed together with personal stories of life as a young Cuban Jewish immigrant. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

About this title

About the Author

Ruth Behar is professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Reviews

Behar was filled with self-loathing and guilt when her grandfather died of cancer in Miami Beach in 1989 while she was away doing anthropological fieldwork on death customs in a Spanish village. That personal tragedy led this University of Michigan anthropology professor to jettison the notion of the anthropologist as semidetached participant-observer, and instead to champion the "vulnerable observer," the ethnographic fieldworker who spells out, and works through, his or her emotional involvement with the subject under study. These six impassioned, intensely personal essays exemplify this subjective approach to varying degrees, though less successfully than Behar did in Translated Woman, the life story of a Mexican street peddler. A Cuban Jew whose grandparents emigrated from Russia, Poland and Turkey in the 1920s, Behar moved to New York City with her family, fleeing Castro's communism, in 1962 when she was nearly five. In one searing essay she discusses the family's 1966 car accident which left her with a broken leg; an invalid for a year, she later recognized "the body is a homeland," a locus of stored memory and pain. Other pieces deal with her return trips to Cuba, her supportive friendship with a Mexican-American woman, her reconnecting with her Jewish heritage and her charged relationship with her husband and his white Methodist Texan family. Her luminous essays build cultural bridges and challenge conventional ways of doing anthropology.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Behar, of Cuban Jewish descent and the author/editor of several books on feminist anthropology (e.g., Women Writing Culture, Univ. of California, 1995), has produced another title of immense importance to those who work with human subjects. The underlying thread of this volume is the question, "Where does the observer fit into the practice of participant observation?" Unlike Clifford Geertz (Interpretation of Cultures, 1973), Behar is a "native" observer, one of a new generation of anthropologists who come from the cultures they study. She demonstrates the concept of "vulnerable observer," or one who comes to ethnography with all one's cultural heritage and emotions at play. Behar's essay on the death of her grandfather while she was studying Spanish peasants is a classic example of this new "autobiographical" methodology. Interested readers might also want to look at In the Field: Readings on the Field Research Experience (Praeger, 1996). The present work will be a welcome addition to academic medicine and nursing, social work, anthropology, and allied health collections.?Cynthia D. Bertelsen, Indexing Svcs., Blacksburg, Va.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In the six essays gathered here, Behar cogently defines the issues in the debate over the place of emotion in anthropology. Behar blends ethnography and autobiography in essays on change and death concerning aging peasants in a rural Spanish village (the subject of her dissertation and first book) and her beloved Cuban, Jewish immigrant grandfather dying of cancer in Miami Beach; explores borders in her relationship with a younger woman, living in Detroit, from the town in Mexico Behar described in Translated Woman (1993); reconstructs the auto accident that disrupted her childhood when agoraphobia threatens to disrupt her adult life; returns, though with doubt and misgivings, to the island "home" she no longer recalls; and defends the effort "to map . . . a borderland between passion and intellect, analysis and subjectivity, ethnography and autobiography, art and life." Mary Carroll

Edition details

• Publisher: Beacon Pr
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807046302
• ISBN 13: 9780807046302
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 195