Nurdan BALCI
Abstract
As an anthropologist and a writer of fiction, Ruth Behar proposes a new genre which claims to have mixed ethnography and memoir. This study aims to look at how Behar, in The Vulnerable Observer, locates her memories within the academic bulwark of objectivity through calling for a method of vulnerability. Her success in going beyond the limits of both modes of writing with her use of vulnerability in observation is based on three essential factors: The first is a candid familiarity with the anthropologist’s past, in which her field of study and focal points are uncoincidentally embedded, i.e. the subtext of a specific ethnographic work. The second is a coalescence of “self” and “the other” sharply divided by what Wallerstein called “world systems”, which results in a meticulous exposition of the frailest parts of one’s memory even unbeknownst to oneself. The third is the insertion of the dissolved meta-language of the academy and the detached scientific approach into an intermediary genre, which makes social sciences available for a wider range of interested readers.
Keywords:
anthropology, vulnerability, memory, objectivity, subjectivity