The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart

Award-winning anthropologist Ruth Behar offers a new theory and practice for humanistic anthropology--an anthropology that is lived and written in a personal voice.

"Behar has convinced me that ethnographic empathy will produce an anthropology that has greater meaning than the distanced and detached academic anthropology of the past." --Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe

Eloquently interweaving ethnography and memoir, award-winning anthropologist Ruth Behar offers a new theory and practice for humanistic anthropology. She proposes an anthropology that is lived and written in a personal voice. She does so in the hope that it will lead us toward greater depth of understanding and feeling, not only in contemporary anthropology, but in all acts of witnessing.

"Her luminous essays build cultural bridges and challenge conventional ways of doing anthropology." --Publishers Weekly