Ethnographers work anywhere from communities in small villages to bustling cities, but (1) its work is always the same: listening to someone else’s story. (2) A subfield of anthropology, ethnography is the study of people and the cultures in which they live. While an objective approach to collecting and sharing information is traditionally encouraged, (3) anthropology professor Ruth Behar believes that integrating her personal experience into her work is not only inevitable but valuable. Doing so, Behar argues, allows readers to better connect with her work.

Born in Cuba in (4) 1956, the granddaughter of Eastern European Jewish émigrés. Behar moved with her family to New York in 1962. These early experiences (5) in her younger years generated an interest in how people form identity based on community, eventually leading Behar to pursue a PhD in cultural anthropology at Princeton. After her graduation in 1983, she wrestled with the norms of her chosen field. While many ethnographers (6) pressured the importance of maintaining emotional impartiality during the research process, Behar felt that divorcing personal experience from ethnography was too clinical.

She first tackled this dilemma in her 1993 book Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story. Based on the four years Behar spent interviewing Esperanza Hernández, a street peddler in the Mexican town of Mexquitic, (7) Hernández felt torn between her Mexican and Indian identities. Behar identified with this tension. (8) Because she maintains an objective tone for most of the book, the final chapter of Translated Woman offers a personal reflection on Behar’s struggle to define her own cultural identity, influenced by (9) Latin America, her birthplace—and the United States. This chapter garnered a divided critical (10) reception, some anthropologists insisted, that Behar had strayed beyond the bounds of her field, while others lauded her unique approach. Behar addressed this topic again in her next book, The Vulnerable Observer (1996), contending that ethnography should be tackled with a combination of tenderness and toughness.

While her technique is unorthodox, Behar finds her work fruitful when she allows her own experience to shape her understanding of the stories she hears. By rejecting an objective approach, she is able to cultivate a personal relationship with her interview subjects, learning about both their identities and her own. She then shares these revelations with her audience. (11)