The Ethnography of Zora Neale Hurston: A Postmodern Writer Before Her Time

Abstract

The recent trend in Anthropology has been to focus on new ways of representing ethnographic experience through the use of interpretive techniques in writing. Although these postmodern approaches are innovative, there are superlative examples of multi-vocality and the mixing of genres in early ethnographic writing. Zora Neale Hurston was one such writer. An African-American, she studied the rural blacks from the South, Haiti, Jamaica, and her home town of Eatonville, florida, and reconstructed their lives and folklore in her novels and ethnographies. We must question why such a gifted writer and ethnographer is rarely read by anthropologists, despite her re-emergence and recent fame in literary and popular circles. An examination of her work shows why her obscurity in anthropology should not continue.