Ruth Behar’s book, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart, stands in direct contrast to the majority of anthropological texts. In it, she adds her own voice to her experiences doing field research. In doing so, she attempts to add to the context that her research occurred in. Instead of trying to maintain a strictly objective stance in relaying events from the field, Behar includes herself in her writing and her studying to enrich the experience for the reader. Reading The Vulnerable Observer takes the reader on a journey through the intersection of Behar’s professional and personal life, and how one informed the other. Each chapter deals with a different field experience, as well as what she was experiencing personally …show more content…
However, it leaves something to be desired in the case of her writing in The Vulnerable Observer. There are several instances in the book where the ethnographic part of the writing seems to take a backseat to Behar’s personal experiences. An example of this is in the fourth chapter of the book, where Behar talks about the car accident she was in as a child. Called “one of the worst accidents in New York traffic history” (pg. 105), it ended with a number of people dead, and quite a few injuries. Behar and her family, which included her 10 year-old brother, her mother and father, and her maternal grandmother, were driving on the Belt Parkway when a car driven by a newly-licensed teen driver jumped the traffic divider and landed on a car traveling the opposite way. Behar’s family’s car plowed into the wreckage. The only person injured from amongst her family was Behar herself. Her femur bone had been broken in multiple places, so she was placed in a body cast, in order to prevent one leg from growing faster than the other. She was immobile for 10 months, but she had trouble acclimating to having the use of both her legs again. Behar felt alienated from the now-healed leg, and didn’t feel she could trust it to hold her up. More than that, she says she didn’t even remember how to walk with that leg. She did re-learn to walk, with pushing from her parents and a nurse, but …show more content…
The second chapter of The Vulnerable Observer is what Behar calls an essay of “double mourning”, and that this experience was what propelled her into “writing ethnography in a vulnerable way” (pg. 21). Her maternal grandfather was dying of cancer at his home in Miami Beach while she was, ironically, gathering data for a paper on the anthropology of dying. Behar knew that to help her grandfather die, she had to actually acknowledge that he was dying, so she chose to go do her fieldwork. She says that, for her, that entire summer revolved around death and dying. The people she was studying were what remained of Spain’s rural, agricultural past. Few new people moved to the village, and the people who had grown up there were encouraged by their parents to move to Spain’s metropolitan centers. Villages like this one were on the threshold on non-existence, as no one new moved into them and the people who had been living there either moved away or grew old and died. According to Behar, the people of Santa Maria del Monte didn’t see death as only happening to them, but also as it applied to the way that they had lived their lives in their village. It’s in telling these two stories simultaneously that Behar is able to really give her ethnographic work emotional depth. Her experiencing death persoanlly as well as professionally gives her research