Customer Reviews

The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart

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This book brings to life the fact that it is not possible to separate science from discourse. It shows through its essays that what sees the fact is not the impartial researcher's eye (does it exist?) but the value-stricken vision of the observer.
In this sense, we are all vulnerable observers. A must for those worried about the deep questions posed by science as a neutral practice. All of us are part of a web of meanings that makes us understand the world and comprehend a fact as a fact. Good reading for those who think positively as well.

As an anthropology student in pursue of the human face of my career I found the light at the end of the tunnel when I read the Vulnerable Observer...and as a Cuban in exile, the book broke also my heart...Not only Dr. Behar marvelously demonstrates the humanness of the hands and mind behind the typewriter (actually behind the keyboard), but she also opens the doors for those of us who want to be visible to the reader, and not precisely as narcissists but because as she says in her book "...The exposure of the self who is also a spectator has to take us somewhere we couldn't otherwise get to. It has to be essential to the argument, not a decorative flourish, not exposure for its own sake. It has to move us beyond that eclipse into inertia ..., in which we find ourselves identifying so intensively with those whom we are observing that all possibility of reporting is arrested, made inconceivable. It has to persuade us of the wisdom of not leaving the writing pad blank" (Behar, 14). We need more anthropology like this and more anthropologists like her...

Another vulnarable observer...

This book covers the notion of including yourself in scholarly writing as a way of acknowledging your bias, and thusly over coming it. Beautifully written and interesting, especially for those seeking to learn creative non-fiction. (ie ethnographers, art educators, critics, anthropologists, etc)

Behar's first-person anthropological essays are perfect for the postmodern generation of intellectuals. Why pretend that we're unbiased, dispassionate observers when clearly we're human beings who are deeply affected when we witness war and poverty and other tragedies? Why has the Academy considered this distance to be preferable? I'm not an anthropologist myself, but I guess you could say I'm a writer/journalist and I think these principles can apply to this field as well.

While I applaud the author's stated intention of injecting personal insight and empathy into a discipline that has long been characterized by often falsely objective posturing, this collection left me highly dissatisfied. The effect of her essays was to make anthropology just another of the many contemporary genres that inflate "personal experience," rendering it melodramatic and marketable. If I were more interested in the individual doing the telling, perhaps the book would be more compelling, and I found myself reading on in the hope that at some point the author would succeed in making herself an interesting subject. Unfortunately, the finale left me with the suspicion that she is not a particularly good writer, though she may be a very good academic, one who sells books to boot.