Barbara Myerhoff (February 16, 1935 – January 7, 1985) was an American anthropologist, filmmaker, and founder of the Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Throughout her career as an anthropologist, Barbara Myerhoff contributed to major methodological trends which have since become standards of social cultural anthropology. These methods include reflexivity, narrative story telling, and anthropologists’ positioning as social activists, commentaries, and critics whose work extends beyond the academy. Biography and early developments of reflexive anthropology Barbara Myerhoff was born on February 16, 1935, in Cleveland, Ohio. Her maternal “storytelling grandmother” Sofie Mann, a transformational childhood and adolescent figure for Myerhoff, helped to raise her. Myerhoff attributed Sofie Mann’s influence to her early appreciation of people’s life stories because Mann taught her that if one looked closely, every person had an interesting story. Instilling what would later become Myerhoff’s anthropological ideology and method, narrative/storytelling, Sofie Mann also helped prepare her for working with the elderly people at the Aliyah Center in Venice California, the subjects of Number Our Days. When working with the elderly, Myerhoff attended to the details of their words, movements, and feelings. She also discovered that they like her grandmother, held tightly to stories as their bodies failed them. Myerhoff emphasized that like her grandmother, their storytelling asserted their love of life, involvement with people, and created an alternative world where they had presence and visibility. Not only did Myerhoff come to appreciate storytelling from Sofie Mann, she also came to value reflexive method. In Number Our Days, and in the introduction to A Crack in the Mirror, Myerhoff relayed that each day she and her grandmother would sit by a window in her home and tell stories about the people who lived in the adjoining houses. As she explained, “we imaginatively entered in turn, making their stories into a commentary on our own lives.” One particularly memorable day of watching out the widow began when frost on the window blocked their view. Assuaging Myerhoff’s distress, her grandmother made a viewing hole by warming a penny in her palm and pressing it against the window. Seeing the world through a framed narrow perspective deeply moved Myerhoff to begin to think about the significance of isolating, attending to, and framing a piece of life. She described that framing the world outside with her grandmother was the beginning of understanding reflexivity, as reflexivity required attending to