R Behar
Biographic Data
| ID | 14631 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Behar |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Behar |
| SIGNATURE | BEHAR R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0009-0000-2399-0498 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 196 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Commentary on “Unsettling the Self
Qué quedará…? Algunas respuestas desde la autoetnografía y la ficción para jóvenes
Últimamente no dejo de pensar que estoy escribiendo para la próxima generación, para aquellos como mi nieta, que han llegado al mundo durante este momento de la pandemia, con toda su ansiedad e inseguridad. Me imagino que para ella la vulnerabilidad será una parte normal de una vida de la que ya no se sabe cómo definir su normalidad. Pensando en estos temas, trataré de dar algunas respuestas sobre los legados que estamos dejando y cómo la autoetn…
The filigree artistry of flash ethnography
This is an afterword to a special section on flash ethnography reflecting on the filigree artistry of these short and intricate pieces that allow us as writers to be vulnerable and write in ways that are enlightening in unexpected ways
What will remain…? Some responses from autoethnography and young people’s fiction
I keep thinking lately that I am writing for the next generation, for those like my granddaughter who have come into the world during this time of the pandemic, with all its anxiety and insecurity. Vulnerability, I imagine, will be for her a normal part of life that no longer knows how to define its normality. Thinking about these issues, I will try to give some answers about the legacies we are leaving behind and how autoethnography and young pe…
An Island Called Home
Yiddish-speaking Jews thought Cuba was supposed to be a mere layover on the journey to the United States when they arrived in the island country in the 1920s. They even called it “Hotel Cuba.” But then the years passed, and the many Jews who came there from Turkey, Poland, and war-torn Europe stayed in Cuba. The beloved island ceased to be a hotel, and Cuba eventually became “home.” But after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, the majority of th…
Translations of the Self
With a central interest in translation as an inherent condition of subjects in contexts of migration, this article encourages a dialogue between ethnographic forms of expression and studies on translation. My exploration of the links between anthropology and translation, as well as their visual and poetic contours, comes through a conversation with Ruth Behar, a writer-anthropologist whose work is deeply rooted in several modes of translation, bo…
Sexual Witchcraft, Colonialism, and Women's Powers
The approaching quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean is stimulating much discussion about how the native peoples of the New World perceived and reacted to European intruders during the sixteenth century. Indian folk traditions, often recorded generations after the events occurred, suggest that native North Americans believed the first European ships they saw to be floating islands inhabited by supernatural spirits and …
What Are Anthropologists Reading, Watching, and Listening To This Summer
Anthropology and the Search for Home
Peer Reviewed
In the Meantime
For me, there was always this other writing I wanted to do but couldn’t, Fiction, the Novel, all the writing I did in the meantime didn’t count, I did it as rehearsal, I did it to win praise, promotions, respect, upward mobility, to do something, be part of a group, not sit idle, have a career, be decent, be thought smart enough, do my duty as a citizen of the academy, which had let me into its inner sanctum under a mistaken identity as an anthro…
Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba
"For fifty-five years U.S.-Cuban relations were couched in terms of the Cold War, often pitting Cubans in the diaspora against Cubans who remained in their homeland. This collection of Cuban and Cuban-American writing and art celebrates the informal networks that Cubans in both countries have maintained through artistic, academic, family, and other ties. The book brings together for the first time in English Cuban voices of the second generation,…
Diasporic Generations
Peer Reviewed
Mediajourneys
R uth B ehar's oeuvre consistently deals with the issue of looking as an anthropological concern. This interview explores the way anthropology in general, and B ehar in particular, looks at and for people. The conversation explores topics of primary interest to this journal's readers, including the advantages and disadvantages of different representational strategies, the relationships of various media to anthropological subjects and to each othe…
What Renato Rosaldo Gave Us
Research Article| April 01 2012 What Renato Rosaldo Gave Us Ruth Behar Ruth Behar Ruth Behar was born in Havana, Cuba, and grew up in New York. Her books include Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story (Beacon Press, 1993), The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Beacon Press, 1996), and An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba (Rutgers University Press, 2007). She edited Bridges to Cuba/ Puentes …
The Evil Eye of the Anthropologist
The Death of the Angel
Tango artist Astor Piazzolla’s composition, ‘La muerte del ángel’, serves as inspiration for a few reflections on the relationship between enlightenment and enchantment in the 21st century. Piazzolla wrote the fugue as accompaniment to a play, ‘Tango del angel’, about an angel who tries to heal broken human spirits in Buenos Aires and ends up dying in a knife fight. Drawing on tango’s melancholy, longing, and hesitant hoping, I share stories from…
Reflections
This final section presents a literary excerpt and three personal reflections on the theme of Aboagora, as well as on the experience of taking part in Aboagora. It opens with a story written by Ruth Behar, dealing with her personal experience of mastering the English language. Professor Behar read this story as an artistic comment within a workshop entitled 'Between Art and Research: Rethinking Professional Borderlands', which dealt with the expe…
Folklore and the Search for Home (American Folklore Society Presidential Invited Plenary Address, October 2008)
Folklore in many ways is the search for an understanding of what home means. Folklore makes us feel at home in our identities. But what can the search for home mean in an age when the soul is global, in an age when the circle of the "we" must expand to create ever more inclusive communities? Should we cling to the folklore of all our little tribes, when building a commonwealth seems more urgent? I will address these questions both in general term…
Anthropology
Ethnography in a Time of Blurred Genres
Drawing from Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer (2006), this article offers suggestions for reading ethnographies in a new way: with an eye toward learning how they were written and what literary feats they accomplished. In a time of blurred genres, the line between fiction and nonfiction has become increasingly indistinct and it is no longer so clear where ethnography is to be positioned. It is therefore important to reassess the possibiliti…
Autobiographical Writing Across the Disciplines
An IntroductionThe ''I'' implicated here is very precise, yet more than half unspeakable.Its descriptors are not mere political trading chips.They are vectors, interlocked with energy, joy, imbalance, determination, depression-themselves not free-floating emotions, but situated and socially formed.-Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ''Reader, I Married Me: A Polygynous Memoir''In atomic physics, we can never speak about nature without, at the same time, spea…
Cross-Cultural Interviewing
Ethnography and the Book that was Lost
This article is a meditation on the way ethnography, as a method and form of expression, has informed a range of reflexive anthropological journeys in Spain, Mexico, and Cuba. It uses a poetic sense of reflexivity to explore the embedded nature of personal experience within the ethnographic process. Borrowing the metaphor of `the lost book' from a fictional story by Agnon, the article explores the contradictory dynamic that emerges in witnessing …
Sand from Varadero Beach
Temporary Latina
Rage and Redemption
Sex and sin, witchcraft and the devil in late-colonial Mexico
Analysis of Mexican Inquisition cases can shed light on various aspects of religion and belief that have gone largely unexplored in the ethnohistory of Mexico: the course that Christianization took during the 18th century, the role that women played in it, and how it affected the racially mixed areas that were growing in importance as the colonial era drew to a close. Men and women in these areas were intensely involved with beliefs linking witch…
Ethnography and the Book that was Lost
This article is a meditation on the way ethnography, as a method and form of expression, has informed a range of reflexive anthropological journeys in Spain, Mexico, and Cuba. It uses a poetic sense of reflexivity to explore the embedded nature of personal experience within the ethnographic process. Borrowing the metaphor of `the lost book' from a fictional story by Agnon, the article explores the contradictory dynamic that emerges in witnessing …
Santa Maria del Monte
The description for this book, Santa Maria del Monte: The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village, will be forthcoming
Death and Memory
Ethnography
The Visions of a Guachichil Witch in 1599
La tentative de resistance a la colonisation espagnole et de renaissance politico-religieuse d'une femme guachichil (du groupe chichimeque, Mexique) qui prophetisait le depart des Espagnols et l'acces des Indiens a la vie eternelle et fut brulee comme sorciere en 1599. L'apercu que donnent les documents d'epoque de la culture des chasseurs-cueilleurs guachichil et de leur experience de la conquete
Property, Progeny, and Emotion
This article considers, from the historical, demographic, and anthropological points of view the various forms that the Leonese peasant family takes during its development cycle, and demonstrates the importance of extended and multiple family households in an area long characterized by partible inheritance and nuclear family households. Two methods of doing family history, at times held incompatible, are used and are shown to be complementary: a …
Gendered Fields
Expanding the Boundaries of Anthropology
Peer Reviewed
Mediajourneys
R uth B ehar's oeuvre consistently deals with the issue of looking as an anthropological concern. This interview explores the way anthropology in general, and B ehar in particular, looks at and for people. The conversation explores topics of primary interest to this journal's readers, including the advantages and disadvantages of different representational strategies, the relationships of various media to anthropological subjects and to each othe…
Yellow marigolds for Ochun
The following text is an extract from Nightgowns from Cuba, a novel-in-progress. The novel is a mix of autobiography, ethnography, and fiction. It examines the lives of three generations of women in a Jewish-Cuban family as seen from the perspective of an Afro-Cuban woman who was employed by the family as a domestic worker in the years before the Cuban revolution of 1959. The extract focuses on the delicate relationship that developed between Reg…
The Couple in the Cage
Translations of the Self
With a central interest in translation as an inherent condition of subjects in contexts of migration, this article encourages a dialogue between ethnographic forms of expression and studies on translation. My exploration of the links between anthropology and translation, as well as their visual and poetic contours, comes through a conversation with Ruth Behar, a writer-anthropologist whose work is deeply rooted in several modes of translation, bo…
Anthropology and the Search for Home
Peer Reviewed
What Renato Rosaldo Gave Us
Research Article| April 01 2012 What Renato Rosaldo Gave Us Ruth Behar Ruth Behar Ruth Behar was born in Havana, Cuba, and grew up in New York. Her books include Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story (Beacon Press, 1993), The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Beacon Press, 1996), and An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba (Rutgers University Press, 2007). She edited Bridges to Cuba/ Puentes …
Folklore and the Search for Home (American Folklore Society Presidential Invited Plenary Address, October 2008)
Folklore in many ways is the search for an understanding of what home means. Folklore makes us feel at home in our identities. But what can the search for home mean in an age when the soul is global, in an age when the circle of the "we" must expand to create ever more inclusive communities? Should we cling to the folklore of all our little tribes, when building a commonwealth seems more urgent? I will address these questions both in general term…
Translated Woman
The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village
The Web of Use-Rights
Thispaper introduces the notion ofa to speak ofthe various communal properties, obligations, and reciprocities that existed in much of rural Spain and Europe until the end ofthe last century. Thefocus here is on the web ofuse-rights in a ruralLeonese village in the north of Spain, where many aspects of the web have persisted virtually to the present day. Using ethnographic and historical materials, Ipoint to the ways in which the web adapted itse…
The Web of Use-Rights
Thispaper introduces the notion ofa to speak ofthe various communal properties, obligations, and reciprocities that existed in much of rural Spain and Europe until the end ofthe last century. Thefocus here is on the web ofuse-rights in a ruralLeonese village in the north of Spain, where many aspects of the web have persisted virtually to the present day. Using ethnographic and historical materials, Ipoint to the ways in which the web adapted itse…
Spiritualist Healers in Mexico
Finkler has done a fine job of portraying this many-sided social reality, taking us on a fascinating journey of various states of illness, health, and faith in a local Mexican setting. Contemporary Sociology A richly documented case study of client complaints, treatment procedures, and outcomes in an alternative healing system--Spiritualism as practiced in a southern region of Hidalgo State, Mexico. American Anthropologist
Mary, Michael and Lucifer
The Visions of a Guachichil Witch in 1599
La tentative de resistance a la colonisation espagnole et de renaissance politico-religieuse d'une femme guachichil (du groupe chichimeque, Mexique) qui prophetisait le depart des Espagnols et l'acces des Indiens a la vie eternelle et fut brulee comme sorciere en 1599. L'apercu que donnent les documents d'epoque de la culture des chasseurs-cueilleurs guachichil et de leur experience de la conquete
Sex and sin, witchcraft and the devil in late-colonial Mexico
Analysis of Mexican Inquisition cases can shed light on various aspects of religion and belief that have gone largely unexplored in the ethnohistory of Mexico: the course that Christianization took during the 18th century, the role that women played in it, and how it affected the racially mixed areas that were growing in importance as the colonial era drew to a close. Men and women in these areas were intensely involved with beliefs linking witch…
Property, Progeny, and Emotion
This article considers, from the historical, demographic, and anthropological points of view the various forms that the Leonese peasant family takes during its development cycle, and demonstrates the importance of extended and multiple family households in an area long characterized by partible inheritance and nuclear family households. Two methods of doing family history, at times held incompatible, are used and are shown to be complementary: a …
Intervillage Conflict in Oaxaca
Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society
Rage and Redemption
Santa Maria del Monte
The description for this book, Santa Maria del Monte: The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village, will be forthcoming
Power and Persuasion
Death and Memory
The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village
Man-Gods in the Mexican Highlands
Expanding the Boundaries of Anthropology
Peer Reviewed
Translated Woman
Translated Woman
The Couple in the Cage
Juban América
Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba
Gendered Fields
Women Writing Culture
The vulnerable observer
Women Writing Culture
Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba
Through personal essays and poetry, short fiction and painting, book reviews, interviews, performance pieces, and hybrid creations of text and image, Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba opens a window onto the meaning of nationality, transnationalism, and homeland in our time. For more than thirty-five years U.S.-Cuban relations have been couched in terms of the Cold War, often pitting Cubans in the diaspora against Cubans who remain in their homeland…
Sociology (34 works) · History (26 works) · Art (22 works) · Anthropology (19 works) · History (14 works) · Latin American and Latino Studies (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Ethnography (11 works) · Literature (10 works)