ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ  – This week’s trivia question: What is autoethnography?

Dr. Ruth Behar is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She was born in Havana, Cuba to a Jewish-Cuban family of Sephardic Turkish, and Ashkenazi Polish and Russian ancestry, and was five when her family immigrated to New York. In 1977 she received her B.A. from Wesleyan University, where she studied Spanish Literature. She then went on to receive an M.A. and PhD in cultural anthropology from Princeton University.

Dr. Behar’s PhD thesis was based on research she did in the 1970s in a small village in northern Spain at a time when changes in social and economic structures were transforming traditional rural life during the late Franco years. A few years ago we spoke with her about that study, and you can listen to that program here.

Behar has worked as an ethnographer in Spain, Mexico, and Cuba, and is known for her humanistic approach to understanding identity, immigration, and the search for home in our global era.

A writer of anthropology, essays, poetry and fiction, she often focuses on issues related to women and feminism.  She was invited to give the keynote address at the Second International Conference on Feminist Anthropology, which was held at the University of Granada in Spain at the beginning of July. This week Ruth is speaking with us about her own work as a cultural anthropologist, feminist anthropology, and the Granada conference.