Ruth Behar (born 1956 in Havana, Cuba) is a Jewish Cuban American anthropologist, poet, and writer who teaches at the University of Michigan.

After receiving her B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1977, she studied cultural anthropology at Princeton University. Her dissertation (1983), based on her first fieldwork in northern Spain, became the basis for her first book. She is a noted feminist, and her personal life experiences as a Jewish Cuban-American woman are frequently an important part of her writing. Her second book, ''Translated Woman'' (1993), was based on ten years of fieldwork in a rural town in Mexico. Her controversial book ''The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart'' examines the role that the personal can play in ethnographic writing. Since 1991 her research and writing have largely focused on her native country, Cuba, which she left at the age of four. Her research on the dwindling yet vibrant Jewish community in Cuba is the focus of her film ''Adio Kerida'' (2002), which featured camerawork and editing by her son Gabriel Frye-Behar. Jewish Cuba is also the topic of her latest book, ''An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba'' (2007).

Awards

In 1988, she became the first Latin woman to be awarded a MacArthur fellowship "genius grant."

Selected bibliography

Books

''The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village: Santa María del Monte'' (1986)

''Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story'' (1993; second edition, Beacon Press, 2003 ISBN 9780807046470)

''Bridges to Cuba / Puentes a Cuba'', editor, University of Michigan Press, 1995, ISBN 9780472066117

''Women Writing Culture'' Editors Ruth Behar, Deborah A. Gordon, University of California Press, 1995, ISBN 9780520202085

''The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart'', Beacon Press, 1996, ISBN 9780807046319

''An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba'', Rutgers University Press, 2007, ISBN 9780813541891

''The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World'', Editors Ruth Behar, Lucía M. Suárez, Macmillan, 2008, ISBN 9780230604773

Film

''Adio Kerida (Goodbye Dear Love): A Cuban-American Woman's Search for Sephardic Memories'' (2002)

Her Writing

Ruth Behar is a Cuban-American cultural anthropologists focussing on her personal stories and experiences as an anthropologist, a Cuban, and a Jew . As an anthropologist, she is allowed to study whatever she wants, and by studying her own family and her experiences growing up in her family she puts her in a strange “in between” position, as both an insider and an outsider simultaneously . She travels regularly to both Cuba and Mexico in search of her own family roots from before their emigration to America after Castro came into power, and to study the lives of women in suppressed societies . A writer of anthropology, essays, poetry, fiction and film making, her work focuses around women, and feminism . Her writing stays true to her poetic nature, giving a compelling insight into her persona as a creator, and as well as an academic .

An Island Called Home

An Island Called Home by Ruth Behar is an insider’s look at the quest Behar seeks to reach a better understanding of her roots as a Jewish Cuban, her place of birth . The idea came to her quietly, for during her own search for explanations and identity, she felt she needed more, and staying in New York just was not enough, she felt she had to go back to her birth place to find solid answers . “I knew the stories of the Jews in Cuba, but it was all about looking at them as a community,” Behar explains . She says she was looking for people who are, “keeping the Jewish traditions alive in Cuba,” . Travelling the island, Behar becomes the confidante to a host of Jewish strangers, building connections for further anthropological research. Conducting one-on-one interviews, combined with black-and-white photography, she builds readers an image of the diasporic thread connecting Cuban Jews to one another . Stories starting in the 1920s tell of displaced Polish and German Jews who fled to Cuba in order to escape Auschwitz, opening mom-and-pops shops, peddling, mixing Spanish and Yiddish, and settling into Latino life in La Habana Vieja – only to be uprooted within decades . In the late 1950s, 16,500 Jews living in Cuba were mass deported to Miami and New York as a reaction to Castro’s growing communist revolution . Being one of the departed, and a strong believer in personal involvement with her work in ethnography, Behar lovingly intertwines her own thoughts and feelings with her analytical observations of her profession . In many ways, this may be one of Behar’s most personal pieces, “What tormented me,” writes Behar, “was that I had no memories of the island. So I went looking for memories,” . Behar’s diligent recounting of the events, in combination with the pictorial collage of interviews with all ages and social classes, she manages to preserves the memory of the people and places that makes up Cuba’s Jewish story that tugs at the heart .

The Vulnerable Observer

The Vulnerable Observer tells the story of how, in 1989, Behar’s grandfather died in Miami Beach, was filled with guilt and self-loathing for not being there and instead in a Spanish village doing anthropological research on death customs . The personal loss leads Behar to throw away the idea of an ethnographer being a “semi-detached participant-observer”, and instead to become a “vulnerable observer,” . The ethnographic fieldworker should spell out, and work though, his or her own emotional involvement with the subject under study . This personal approach has come about due to a new intellectual source for writing, strongly critiquing conventional objectivity . The critique suggests that the distanced, impersonal modes of presenting objectively are incomplete . The six empathetic and impassioned, powerfully personal essays in The Vulnerable Observer exemplify the subjective approach, although not as well as Behar achieved in Translated Women with the life story of a street peddler . Being a Jew from Cuba, Behar’s grandparents emigrated from Russia, Poland and Turkey during the 1920s, and then again in 1962 to escape Castro’s communism . In a heart wrenching essay, Behar tells the story of how, at the age of 9, her family suffered through a terrible car crash that left her with a broken leg and immobile for a year . The experience and recovery period led her to the recognition that “the body is a homeland” of stored memory and pain . Her luminous essays build cultural bridges and challenge conventional ways of doing anthropology .

Translated Women

In 1995, the feminist anthropologist Ruth Behar was working in Mexico when she befriended an Indian witch working as a street peddler . Townspeople said the witch, Esperanza Hernandez, had used black magic to blind her ex-husband after he regularly battered her and then left her for his mistress . Domestic violence is common in Mexico, however the victims are often portrayed as accepting their state, a state which Esperanza rejects . Behar’s novelist telling of Esperanza’s story in translated Women paints a macha woman whose egotism alienated her own mother, inspiring Behar to portray Esperanza as a feminist heroine . Esperanza claims she found redemption in a spiritist cult constructed around Pancho Villa, blaming her pent-up rage for the deaths in infancy of the first six of her 12 children . Esperanza’s rage led her to beating up her husband’s lover, threw her son out of the house, beat a daughter for refusing to support her, and disowned another son for having an affair with an uncle’s ex-mistress because she considered it to be incestuous . As a feminist, Behar strains to find parallels between her own experience as a women fighting for respect, and her Mexican conspirator . From examining her own border, she discovers her Latina-gringa conflicts based in her realization she may have lost precious cultural parts to her from patterning herself around the American Dream . Esperanza’s odyssey does more than discuss and examine physical borders, it includes subject of margins and separations . Translated Women contributes to the argument many other feminist anthropologists fight for, that studying women in anthropology has been undervalued due to traditional academic prejudices seeing anthropology from a women-centered analysis as being too personally biased and should not be heavily valued as contributing to collective knowledge of anthropology . However, Behar writes a compelling argument in comparison between her own experiences and that of Esperanza’s for feminist anthropologists and women struggling with cultural conflicts everywhere .

References

External links

Personal Website

''Adio Kerida: A Cuban Sephardic Journey'' Official Website

Website for Gabriel Frye-Behar

Category:1956 births Category:Living people Category:American anthropologists Category:American anthropology writers Category:Anthropology educators Category:Cuban anthropologists Category:Women anthropologists Category:Cultural anthropologists Category:Latin Americanists Category:MacArthur Fellows Category:Wesleyan University alumni Category:Princeton University alumni Category:University of Michigan faculty Category:Cuban Jews Category:American Jews Category:American writers of Cuban descent

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