Рут Бехар: Кубинско-американский антрополог и писательница.

Cuban American anthropologist and writer

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. She is a recipient of the Belpré Medal.

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 Cuba. She has specialized in studying the lives of women in developing societies. Behar is a professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. A writer of anthropology, essays, poetry and fiction, Behar focuses on issues related to women and feminism. Professor Jonda C. McNair also highlights the importance of Ruth Behar using her personal experience as a Cuban American of Sephardic Turkish, Ashkenazi Polish and Russian ancestry to write stories that are culturally authentic.

Traveling Heavy (2013) is a memoir about her Cuban American family, descended from both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews in Cuba, as well as the strangers who ease her journey in life. Her probings about her complicated Jewish Cuban ancestry and family's immigration to America explore issues about identity and belonging. Kirkus Reviews described her book as "A heartfelt witness to the changing political and emotional landscape of the Cuban American experience."

An Island Called Home (2007) was written in Behar's quest for a better understanding of Jewish Cuba and particularly her family's roots. She noted, "I knew the stories of the Jews in Cuba, but it was all about looking at them as a community". As her family was among those who left Cuba, Behar intertwines her personal thoughts and feelings with her professional, analytical observations of the current society. She argues that the ethnographic fieldworker should identify and work though, his or her own emotional involvement with the subject under study. She suggested that the ideal of a "scientific," distanced, impersonal mode of presenting materials was incomplete. Townspeople said the witch, Esperanza Hernandez, had used black magic to blind her ex husband after he regularly beat her and then left her for his mistress. Esperanza's odyssey examines physical borders, margins and separations.

In 1988, Behar was the first Latina woman to be awarded a MacArthur fellowship. *In 2011 she gave a Turku Agora Lecture.