Produro.

because you're discover things as you write. If you already know everything, this is what I always say to students.

If you know everything you're going to write, then it's not worth writing.

From Futura Media and PRX, it's Latino USA. I'm Maria Inno Hosa.

Today, one of the most influential anthropologists of our time tells us about her creative process on the page and on the dance floor.

Ruth Behar had to learn the rules of anthropology, to know she wanted to break them.

Today, Ruth is a well-known name in academic and literary circles,

but before all that, Ruth was a PhD student at Princeton.

There she was taught that anthropologists had to be impersonal objective observers of the people and cultures that they study.

And for years, Ruth was a good student,

an exceptional student, in fact.

Ruth was the first Latina to be awarded a MacArthur Genius Fellowship in 1988 when she was just 32 years old.

But in 1996 Ruth published a book she thought might end her career. She titled it The Vulnerable Observer

Anthropology that breaks your heart. It's a collection of personal and

ethnographic essays where she argues that objectivity in cultural

anthropology is a myth.

This approach changed the field as we know it.

I still get emails and letters from people who have read the book and they said

thanks to you I did this or I wrote this or I would never have done this or would never

have talked about myself in my scholarship so it did open a door for others who wanted

to write in a different way than they had been taught to write.

Ruth was born in Cuba to a Jewish family.

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