Ruth Behar famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

In anthropology, which historically exists to 'give voice' to others, there is no greater taboo than self-revelation. The impetus of our discipline, with its roots in Western fantasies about barbaric others, has been to focus primarily on 'cultural' rather than 'individual' realities. The irony is that anthropology has always been rooted in an 'I' - understood as having a complex psychology and history - observing a 'we' that, until recently, was viewed as plural, ahistorical, and nonindividuated.
-- Ruth Behar

#Reality #Self #Voice
The anxiety around such work [vulnerably written ethnographies] is that it will prove to be beyond criticism, that it will be undiscussable.
-- Ruth Behar

#Anxiety #Criticism #Ethnography
Written with grace and thoroughly researched, One People, One Blood is an ethnography with a lot of heart that also sheds new light on a fascinating and fraught chapter in recent Jewish history.
-- Ruth Behar

#Heart #Light #Blood
I have a huge need for financial security; the emigrant in me has a fear of ending up homeless and in the gutter.
-- Ruth Behar

#Fear #Needs #Gutters

The worst sorrows in life are not in its losses and misfortunes, but its fears.
All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
One symptom of his (Hitler) being strangely at variance with reality, or the nature of things,was his gift for wearing inappropriate of ludicrous clothing...When he was supposed to be starting a militaristic revolution he was wearing evening dress and an ill-fitting black tailcoat...and his army medals.
It is possible to be a meta-physician without believing in a transcendent reality; for we shall see that many metaphysical utterances are due to the commission of logical errors, rather than to a conscious desire on the part of their authors to go beyond the limits of experience.
We hope we're better. The reality is we had a pretty darn good team last year. But you can't just throw your gloves out there and be good again. We want to take that next step as a team.
One bright and thankful look at the cross is worth a thousand morbid, self-condemning reflections.
I was once naÃ¯ve enough to ask the late Duke of Devonshire why he liked the town of Eastbourne. He replied with a self-deprecating shrug that one of the things he liked was that he owned it.
Sensual is being in tune with your sensual self.
My voice is the only material thing in which I can still reveal myself. Go ahead and cut off the hand or the testicles of a voice. Try to find the head of a voice, the orifice through which it passes, or even the breasts to which you can attach the clips of your electrodes. Nothing. Resonant tooth.
When religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.

Ruth Behar famous quotes

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