Ruth Behar

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Ruth Behar (born Havana, Cuba, 1956) is a Jewish Cuban American anthropologist, poet, and writer who teaches at the University of Michigan. After receiving her B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1956, she studied cultural anthropology at Princeton University. Her dissertation (1983), based on her first fieldwork in northern Spain, became the basis for her first book. Her more recent writings have focused on her fieldwork in Mexico, Cuba, and the United States. In 1988 she became the first Latina woman to be awarded a MacArthur fellowship. She is a noted feminist, and her personal life experiences as a Jewish Cuban-American woman are frequently an important part of her writing. Her controversial book The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart examines the role that the personal can play in ethnographic writing.