essays

“Unconsciously at first, but later with more direction, I chose the essay as a genre through which to attempt (the original meaning of essai, or essay) the dialectic between connection and otherness that is at the center of all forms of historical and cultural representation. The essay has been described as "an act of personal witness. The essay is at once the inscription of a self and description of an object." An amorphous, open-ended, even rebellious genre that desegregates the boundaries between self and other, the essay has been the genre of choice for radical feminists and cultural critics pursuing thick description. And perhaps too, through the essay, anthropologists can come closest to fulfilling those illicit desires, so frequently alluded to in Malinowski's diary, of longing to write poetry, fiction, drama, memoir, anything but ethnography, that second fiddle genre we have inherited.”

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by Ruth Behar from The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that breaks your heart (1996)