Ruth Behar
| Ruth Behar | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | 1956 Cuba |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Cultural Anthropology |
| Institutions | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor |
| Alma mater |
Princeton University Wesleyan University |
Ruth Behar (born 1956) is a Cuban-American anthropologist and writer. Her work includes academic studies, as well as poetry, memoir, and literary fiction. As an anthropologist, she has argued for the open adoption and acknowledgement of the subjective nature of research and participant-observers.
Behar was born in Havana, Cuba in 1956 to a Jewish-Cuban family of Sephardic Turkish, and Ashkenazi Polish and Russian ancestry. She was four when her family immigrated to the US following Fidel Castro's gaining power in the revolution of 1959. More than 94% of Cuban Jews left the country at that time., together with many others of the middle and upper classes. Behar attended local schools and studied as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, receiving her B.A. in 1977. She studied cultural anthropology at Princeton University, earning her doctorate in 1983.
She travels regularly to Cuba and Mexico to study aspects of culture, as well as to investigate her family's roots in Jewish Cuba. She has specialized in studying the lives of women in developing societies. Since 1991 her research and writing have largely focused on her native country, Cuba, which she left at the age of four; her parents had family that had been there since the 1920s. Her research on the dwindling Jewish community in Cuba is also the focus of her film, Adio Kerida (2002). It featured camera work and editing by her son Gabriel Frye-Behar.
Behar is a professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her literary work is featured in the Michigan State University's Michigan Writers Series. A writer of anthropology, essays, poetry and fiction, Behar focuses on issues related to women and feminism.
Her personal life experiences as a Jewish Cuban-American woman are frequently an important part of her writing. Her dissertation (1983), based on her first fieldwork in northern Spain, became the basis for her first book.
Her second book, Translated Woman (1993), was based on ten years of fieldwork in a rural town in Mexico. Her book, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart, examines the role that the personal can play in ethnographic writing and generated controversy. Jewish Cuba is the topic of her book, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba (2007), as well as her latest book, Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in between Journeys (2013).
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