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. In The Vulnerable Observer, Ruth Behar--ethnographer, essayist, editor, poet, and a professor of anthropology--challenges traditional theories and offers a more personal approach to anthropology in which the line between observer and observed is not so easily drawn and the observers themselves are not only visible, but vulnerable to their subjects. As she writes, "Call it sentimental, call it Victorian and nineteenth century, but I say that anthropology that doesn't break your heart just isn't worth doing anymore." These insightful, often poetic essays weave together memories of childhood as a Cuban Jewish immigrant with accounts of fieldwork in Spain, Cuba, and the United States. Along the way, Behar tirelessly investigates and elegantly communicates the "central dilemma of all aspects of witnessing." In her own words, "Are there limits--of respect, piety, pathos--that should not be crossed, even to leave a record?" 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 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 o
