About

Ruth Behar is a Professor of Anthropology and the James W. Fernandez Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University. Her research areas include concepts of home, diaspora, displacement, immigration, and travel. She employs life stories, narrative approaches, ethnographic memoir, photography, and film within her work, focusing on visual anthropology and feminist ethnography. Behar's ethnographic interests encompass Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Latinas/os, Sephardic and Latin American Jewish communities. She has received numerous awards, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellows Award, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award, and a Fulbright Senior Fellowship. Her notable publications include 'Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in between Journeys' and works on the presence of the past in Spanish villages.

Research topics

• Sociology
• History
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Ancient history
• Archaeology
• Genealogy
• Law

Selected publications

• Mi querida Magi

  Mistral | Journal of Latin American Women s Intellectual & Cultural History · 2026-03-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Between Poetry and Anthropology

  2025-11-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter explores how the author has navigated her relationship between poetry and anthropology. This leads her to examine the fraught relationship between these pursuits, which is part and parcel of the history of anthropology. Confronting the poetry of Ruth Benedict, who wrote poems under a pseudonym so that her mentor Franz Boas wouldn't know about her disloyalty to anthropology, Behar finds herself admitting that Benedict's poetic anthropology was more of a contribution than her hidden poems. She then goes on to examine how, in her own work, she followed Benedict's example and sought to produce poetic anthropology as she went on to do fieldwork in Spain, Mexico, and Cuba. Encouraged by Gloria Anzaldúa, who gave many Latinas the confidence to write with more freedom and heart, Behar finds a resolution to her borderland position as a poet and an anthropologist by writing autoethnography and showing her students that it is possible to write poetically, using our imagination and language skills to offer a more profound view of the human condition.

  PublisherDOI

• What I Lost in Cuba: The Journey from Ethnography to Fiction

  Journal of Folklore Research · 2025-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: "What I Lost in Cuba: The Journey from Ethnography to Fiction" traces the path from anthropological research to fictional writing in the creation of a historical novel, Letters from Cuba . The novel isbased on my maternal grandmother's story. She was a Jewish immigrant from Poland who found refuge in Cuba on the eve of WWII. Drawing on her story, filling in gaps with my imagination, while also setting the novel in the rural town where she lived and where I did research, I address the question of how fiction, ethnography, and folklore can blend to form a blurred genre that allows for a speculative understanding of a complex historical moment.

  PublisherDOI

• Commentary on “Unsettling the Self: Autoethnography and Related Kin”

  American Anthropologist · 2025-04-24

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  I have read these papers with awe, surprise, and joy, as well as with a touch of sadness—where was this anthropology when I was starting out almost half a century ago? An anthropology that's personal, intimate, compelling, humbling, healing, holistic, multigenre, poetic, written with grace and humility, and most of all so very human. I wish I were young now and starting out and knew I didn't have to ask for permission to write as freely as the authors here do—with such vulnerability, such deep feeling. The editors of this volume, Christine Walley and Denielle Elliott, ask, why is this writing happening now? I wonder if in a world at once so fractured and so interconnected, a world at once on fire and collapsing into the sea, perhaps there simply isn't time to stand on ceremony and wait to be patted on the back. We must do the writing that doesn't alienate us from ourselves, the writing that is tender and tough, beautiful and unflinching, memorable and haunting. This is the writing that unsettles the self, because for many of us (I don't dare say “all of us” since there are circles where things haven't changed all that much), anthropology is no longer the study of the “other”; it is a study of our own otherness. Going elsewhere, because elsewhere is where we're supposed to find our anthropological subject matter, ceases to make sense now that elsewhere is everywhere and nowhere. It's a moment when delving into the heart of things and examining who we are and how we reached our positions as thinkers has turned into a new kind of quest narrative where homecoming is at the center of the journeys we take, and we draw on research, self-reflection, and the art of writing to tell stories that would otherwise have been lost for seeming “too personal.” Those of us doing this work aren't the hardy sorts that anthropologists once tried to be—getting appendices removed before setting off to do fieldwork, suffering through bouts of malaria while doing fieldwork. We are a tribe of sensitive anthropologists, keenly aware of our colonizing heritage and wary of causing more harm. We have learned to listen, and now we want to listen to those closest to us, our most intimate interlocutors—a grandmother, a father, a daughter. After all, the principles of kinship are part of our legacy as anthropologists. We are skilled at addressing genealogy. So, we are analyzing our own kinship structures, our own families, and offering chronicles based on different sorts of inheritances, including garments, documents, stories, and traumas left unspoken but remembered. And some of us turn the spotlight on ourselves, examining the lived experience of our vulnerability and our unsettledness through the study of illness, cancer, depression, loss, and grief, recognizing the urgency of being present in those moments and that studying anything else amid anguish and despair seems somehow false. Writing any kind of ethnography involves a strong commitment to tell things as you heard and saw them, not as you wanted them to be. Ethnography is different from fiction, where you can imagine what you don't know, where you can fill in gaps in the historical record with the realities that might have been or realities that should have been. At the same time, more than ever, we are blurring genres, bending genres, leaving gatekeeping behind, and mixing introspective work with carefully researched public histories and sociopolitical contexts. It's a new era of bricolage that involves art and aesthetics in a way that is exciting in how aware we've become of the infinite possibilities of language and multimodal forms of communication to make our stories come alive. The concern for inclusivity and accessibility is crucial to this work. It is not meant to be cloistered in the academy for a privileged few to interrogate. This is work to share across borders, to be read not only by anthropologists but by our mothers who didn't receive a college education. And nothing is more meaningful than when what we wrote with so much heart falls into the hands of unexpected readers whose hearts were aching for our stories. In the history of anthropology, there have been predecessors, among them Zora Neale Hurston, Ruth Benedict, and Edward Sapir, who sought to write fiction, memoir, and poetry, and embrace their artistic souls. But they have been a minority. And they felt hemmed in, especially those who entered the ranks of the academy, so much so that they tended to hide their creative work. Benedict, for example, published her poems under a pseudonym, for fear Franz Boas, her mentor, would learn of this indiscretion. All of us anthropologists who also yearned to be writers and artists and creators inherited this fear, and now many of us have finally let go, and there's such a sense of freedom about what's possible in anthropology. But the question arises: How do we hold on to the scientific dimensions of our discipline? We can't just become a subfield of creative writing, can we? My graduate students worry about these questions. They want grants, of course, to do their research, they want to learn how to write grant proposals, they want jobs like ours, and they ask, will they get them by writing autoethnography, intimate ethnography, memoir, and fiction? Is this a luxury attained after tenure? A prize for all the years of writing dense academic prose? I believe we need to stop thinking this way. It is limiting and narrows what anthropology can be as an intellectual field. I feel strongly that we can write in different genres and different voices, that we can (and should) find inspiration in many kinds of scholarship and literature, that we can write op-ed essays, creative nonfiction, memoir, fiction, and ethnography as well as peer-reviewed articles and classical forms of academic scholarship. I am now writing picture books and middle-grade fiction, and it has been exciting to bring anthropological ideas of identity, memory, culture, and heritage into that writing to reach a younger age group, something I'd never expected to do. Some of my anthropology colleagues even give my books to their kids! There's huge interest in ethnographic writing nowadays, across the disciplines and beyond the academy as well. I witness this every year when I teach my seminar on ethnographic writing. Students come not only from anthropology but also from communication studies, education, history, art, creative writing, comparative literature, Latina/Latino studies, and many other fields. I am fascinated by how this humble genre that anthropologists invented seems so vital and so timely. The methods we have developed for the close analysis of relationships, the self-reflection that makes us question what we know and how we know, the commitment to engaging with the meaning of place in all its complexities, these are dimensions of our writing that are compelling and offer inspiration for writers, thinkers, and artists of diverse backgrounds. Ethnography has a lot to give, there's no question about that. And we're aware that we can go still deeper, telling stories that are urgent, lucid, emotionally resonant, and ever more embracing of what it means to be human. Although I began by saying I felt a touch of sadness that these ventures in ethnographic writing weren't widespread when I started out, I am glad to be around to see the many forms of expression that are possible now. I am hopeful for anthropology at a time when it's so difficult to be hopeful.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Exilic Pilgrimages

  2025-09-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Meshing autoethnography, chronicles, poetry, and reflections on fictional stories, Ruth Behar's essay examines the theme of exilic pilgrimages and the perpetual search for home that has characterized her journeys as a cultural anthropologist and a creative writer. Being a Cuban-Jewish immigrant child brought by her family to the United States, she was aware from an early age of her exilic identity, but it was the discipline of anthropology that gave her a passport to go on exilic pilgrimages. This made it possible for her to engage with the world in the manner that exiles do—obsessively aware of impermanence and grateful for moments of connection. In this essay, she discusses her journeys to Spain, Mexico, and Cuba made possible by the anthropological passport, as well as how the need to displace herself continues now in the world of imagination, in the fiction she writes for young people on questions of history, culture, and identity. She's come to realize that she can travel in worlds constructed purely of memory and possibility, but she can’t help but anchor these worlds in the known world that years of research have given her access to. Her essay examines the ways she seeks to tell stories that blur genres and are capacious enough to make room for the vast poetics of home and the intergenerational burdens and joys of carrying that responsibility.

  PublisherDOI

• Digging Deep into the Essentials of Ethnographic Writing

  2024-10-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Vulnerability

  2024-04-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In this essay, I trace my process of moving into the field of Latinx life writing by examining how intellectual ideas, personal experiences, and intersections with other Latinx scholars and writers influenced me to pursue daring directions as a scholar, educator, and writer. Throughout my career, I’ve alternated between anthropological scholarship and creative writing, seeking a path as a Latinx writer who could speak within the academy as well as beyond to those who lacked educational privilege. I explore here how, through the concept of vulnerability, I gradually crafted a Latinx approach to life writing.

  PublisherDOI

• The Death of the Angel

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2023-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The filigree artistry of flash ethnography

  Anthropology & Humanism · 2023-07-25 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Summary This is an afterword to a special section on flash ethnography reflecting on the filigree artistry of these short and intricate pieces that allow us as writers to be vulnerable and write in ways that are enlightening in unexpected ways.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• ¿Qué quedará…? Algunas respuestas desde la autoetnografía y la ficción para jóvenes

  AIBR Revista de Antropologia Iberoamericana · 2023-01-12

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Últimamente no dejo de pensar que estoy escribiendo para la próxima generación, para aquellos como mi nieta, que han llegado al mundo durante este momento de la pandemia, con toda su ansiedad e inseguridad. Me imagino que para ella la vulnerabilidad será una parte normal de una vida de la que ya no se sabe cómo definir su normalidad. Pensando en estos temas, trataré de dar algunas respuestas sobre los legados que estamos dejando y cómo la autoetnografía y la ficción para jóvenes proponen maneras de buscar la confluencia entre el pasado, el presente y el futuro. Entre lo que quedará, espero mostrar la importancia de los momentos de conexión que logramos en los encuentros antropológicos y en la creación artística, momentos que nos permiten sentir que compartimos una herencia humana que nos pertenece igualmente a todos y todas por el hecho de existir en el mundo.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jill Dubisch

  9 shared

• Stanley Brandes

  9 shared

• Jane Schneider

  9 shared

• Lawrence J. Taylor

  9 shared

• Caroline B. Brettell

  Southern Methodist University

  9 shared

• Norma Alarcón

  Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero

  9 shared

• Ellen Badone

  McMaster University

  9 shared

• Renato Rosaldo

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• MacArthur Foundation Fellows Award
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award
• Fulbright Senior Fellowship
• Institute for the Humanities, Hunting Family Faculty Fellows…
• Wesleyan University, Distinguished Alumna Award in Recogniti…