"Sis Cat" as ethnographer: self-presentation and self-inscription in Zora Neale Hurston's 'Mules and Men.'

One of the most striking photographs ever taken of an African-American woman writer can be found in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. It depicts Zora Neale Hurston clad completely in white - dress, stockings, and shoes - standing in front of the Chevrolet she used on her folklore-collecting travels throughout the American South in the late 1920s. The arresting thing about this photographic image is that her garments are neatly and contrastively accessorized by a gun belt, a shoulder holster, and a ten-gallon hat. She is posing for the camera eye, very much in her "performance mode," with her hands on her hips, thumbs assertively on the belt, feet firmly planted on the ground. Looking up to her right, she has a jaunty smile that might best be described as cocksure (see Fig. 1 on p. 607).(1)

I begin with a description of this photograph because, in "The Problem of the Text," Mikhail Bakhtin writes of the "author image" in visual and literary works of art. This is what allows the viewer or reader to feel the presence of the artist even though the author is not a depicted, or visual, image, as she would be, say, in a photograph. The "author image" is produced by the writer in some sense entering the text "as part of the work" (109). The problem, as Bakhtin sees it, of the "forms in which [the author] is expressed in a work" (109) is of interest to the reader of the first of Zora Neale Hurston's two book-length works of ethnography, Mules and Men, first published in October 1935.(2) The visible image in the photograph I have just described seems consciously replicated by Hurston the "author image" -maker and self-inscriber, and it is this problem which has hindered a sympathetic understanding of Hurston's achievement as an ethnographer for decades. Critics of ethnography have anxiously questioned how far the author can go in depicting him/herself as an image in writing which, aspiring to scientific discourse, has traditionally attempted to deny or suppress the existence of authorial images. I would argue that Hurston had an understanding far ahead of her time that writing social-scientific texts was not an impersonal, value-free form of claiming authority. She felt, for reasons of both race and gender, the constraints of complying with the modes of orthodox anthropological writing. Moreover, she broke through these constraints in ways that result, in Mules and Men, in a significant achievement in American ethnology. Her ethnography shows us that it is possible to overcome, as Hortense Spillers has recently expressed it, the "pernicious distinctions" that separate "academy vs. vernacular," "the scholar vs. the folk," and the "ivory tower vs. the real world" (qtd. in Baker and Redmond 71).

There is no question that Hurston's deservedly high place in American fiction and theater has become increasingly uncontested in the last two decades. Indeed, her work as cultural critic, too, has received a kind of canonization by her inclusion in the recent anthology The Gender of Modernism, a significant revisionary assertion about the crucial role played by European, European-American, and African-American women in the development of High Modernism before 1930. Yet, for all that, Hurston's work as a professional folklorist and ethnologist in a context beyond the purely creative or literary has hitherto received only limited evaluation.(3) In this article, I would like to make a start at assessing her place in American anthropology and argue that it is more important than has often been recognized. It is possible to see Hurston shift the stable ground of traditional anthropology by the ways in which she presents the self in the act of participating in, and subsequently recording, the "folklore event." Mary Helen Washington has pointed out that "one of the main preoccupations of the black woman writer is the black woman herself" (qtd. in Baker and Redmond 53), but this preoccupation with self in forms of discourse outside the realm of the creative arts has been a problematic factor in any assessment of the fun scope of Hurston's achievements.

Central to my evaluation of Hurston's ethnographic work is the role played in ethnography by the author and the ways in which the ethnographer inscribes herself into the finished text. Here I would take issue with Hurston's biographer, Robert Hemenway, who states that the I narrating Mules and Men is created so as not "to intrude on the folklore event." He contends that Hurston's narrator is a "curiously retiring figure," a "self-effacing reporter created by Hurston the folklorist to dramatize the process of collecting and make the reader feel part of the scene" (164). I believe Hemenway, though essentially correct about the reportorial function of this narrator, understates the forceful presence and importance of the author image in Mules and Men. In this regard he mirrors many of Hurston's contemporary mainstream European-American reviewers. Jonathan Daniels' review of the book in the October 1935 Saturday Review of Literature effectively erases both her presence and her racial identity, however well-meaning his comments:

No advantage of skin or blood could have produced the book which Miss Hurston brought back from the gay "woofing" of Florida's lumber camps and the tawdry rituals of the little sinister streets in New Orleans Vieux Carre. Only an ability to write - a rare conjunction of the sense of the ridiculous and the sense of the dramatic - could have produced this remarkable collection of Negro folk tales and folk customs. (12)

Instead, I hope to show - in a more positive way than her critics have in the past - that Hurston's presence in the work as a created and asserted self is central and essential, unifying the action it depicts and giving a strong sense of cohesion to the collection's disparate parts and multitudinous story-telling voices. While it is true that recent critics, not the least of whom is Alice Walker, have praised Mules and Men for its celebration of the African-American communitarian spirit,(4) the work also celebrates the individual storyteller who makes the expression of the group culture possible. The I of the work is self-empowering in ways that are ineluctably related to the desire for the expression of selfhood which marks much African-American women's writing.(5) What Barbara Christian has said of Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God seems equally pertinent to Mules and Men, the first published book-length work of anthropology by a Black woman. Both Janie Crawford of the novel and the I of Hurston the real-world anthropologist "radically envision the self as central" (Christian 175). Janie's empowering attainment of self-revelation through narrative, which provides both the occasion for, and the structure of, the novel is a paradigm for the real-world ethnographer as well (Wall 661). It is this narrative trajectory which has made Hurston's anthropology the target of yet another kind of critical misunderstanding: outright invective from her contemporary male critics, who questioned her objectivity, as well as her scientific and academic qualifications.

Mules and Men is, at first glance, a collection of seventy African-American folktales recorded by Hurston on several extended "expeditions" to the American South under the auspices of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and under the conflict-ridden patronage of Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason." The work, written on her return to New York between March 1930 and September 1932, and only eventually published in 1935, is divided into two parts, "Folk Tales" and "Hoodoo." On its initial publication, the first part gave a general readership insights into the oral transmission of often highly subversive folk tales and songs. The second part details the occult rituals and folk medicine practices of the conjure artists of New Orleans. It is a work of anthropology, in its finished form, by virtue of its glossary, appendices, preface by another authoritative anthropologist (in this case Franz Boas, Hurston's mentor), and footnotes which explain such exotic words as chitterlings and doodley squat. In short, it contains many of the conventional textual appurtenances of a scholarly work of social science. Yet, for all that, Hurston is more than the merely observing and reporting presence which orthodox ethnography demanded of her. She is a central participant in the story-telling contests of rural Florida and the conjure rituals of New Orleans.

Hurston's presentation of herself as an acting force (who assumes a variety of identities) - that is, one who does, not merely looks - seemed problematic to readers expecting a standard work of ethnography. Her first critics believed the book was good "entertainment" and could therefore not merit consideration as a scientific document.(8) Arna Bontemps said of her writings that it was impossible to tell where the anthropology "left off and where Zora began" (qtd. in Hemenway 166). More recently, Nathan Huggins has asserted that "the link between Hurston's mind and material was never clear" (qtd. in Hemenway 80). This suggests, in a pejorative sense, that Mules and Men is as much fiction as social science, if not more so. Even a critic as sympathetic as Robert Hemenway can't bring himself to acknowledge the work as an example of anthropology in the traditionally accepted sense. For example, the work ignores or invents chronology and scientific methodology and is lacking in other hallmarks of ethnography like cross-cultural references and citations of other related scholarship (Hemenway 172). Indeed, there is very little, if any, theoretical or analytical content, an approach to her work which Hurston deliberately agreed to take in order to make Mules and Men a more commercially viable property.(9) Beyond the criticism of her methodology and scientific approach, Hurston also suffered the slings and arrows of outraged social critics. Sterling Brown, for example, damned Mules and Men for lacking verisimilitude and a sense of social responsibility in its depiction of rural Florida as a problem-free pastoral world evoked by an egocentric narrator. If Hurston's work were "more bitter," Brown complained, "it would be nearer the total truth" (qtd. in Hemenway 219).

But if Hurston has been attacked for using the modes of fiction in her reports "from the field," she may also be said to have reinvented anthropology in ways that seem increasingly acceptable to theorists and commentators of postmodern and postcolonial anthropology. I am cognizant that this argument is potentially fraught with the risks articulated recently by Michael Awkward, who cautions against seeing literature by African-Americans in postmodernist terms. For this approach, he convincingly argues, carries with it the real possibility of virtually erasing the blackness out of African-American authorial utterance" (qtd. in Baker and Redmond 76). What I hope to demonstrate is that Hurston's chief ethnographic text is a significant expression of a central tenet in her own artistic manifesto; Mules and Men is ethnography which also happens to prefigure later questions about institutionalized social science. In "Characteristics of Negro Expression" (1934), Hurston declared that, while the African-American "lives and moves in the midst of a white civilization, everything that he [sic] touches is re-interpreted for his [sic] own use" (181). This concept of African-American originality also pertains to her own ethnography, a form of expression which, like all cultural forms, is the product of what Hurston called "the exchange and re-exchange of ideas between groups" (181). Put succinctly, Mules and Men is her own "re-interpretation" of ethnography.

We would do well, first, to examine the traditional understanding of what social science texts should have aspired to at the time Hurston was undergoing her academic training at Barnard and Columbia in the 1920s. From a broad perspective, as Michel Foucault has pointed out, all scientific writing has traditionally and normatively strived to suppress the sense that a work has an author at all. In the Age of Enlightenment an emphasis on rationalism and positivism dictated that scientific discourses

began to be received for themselves, in the anonymity of an established or redemonstrable truth, their membership in a systematic ensemble, and not the reference to the individual who produced them, stood as their guarantee. The author function faded away . . . . (109)

This eventually became the predominant view of authorial "presence" in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, as elsewhere. Hurston, apparently affectionately, referred to Boas as "Papa Franz," which is apt in so far as he had established a patriarchal authority over early American anthropology which can hardly be underestimated. Dell Hymes has asserted, for instance, that Boas can be said to have been the "organizer" of the "great tradition" of modern anthropology as it moved from its base in established museums of natural history into its "domestication" as an institutionalized academic discipline (10). George W. Stocking, Jr., makes an even greater claim for Boas's importance:

More than any other man [he] defined the "national character" of anthropology in the United States . . . . There is no real question that he was the most important single force in shaping American anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century. (1)

It was Boas above all who articulated the essential underlying assumptions about the discipline (Hymes 11). As early as 1887 he asserted that truth in anthropology could only be attained by getting behind appearances, transcending the point of view of the observer, to arrive at categories that were not founded "in the mind of the student" but were somehow derived from, consistent with, and, in a sense, internal to the phenomena themselves (Stocking 4). This insistence on de-emphasizing the anthropologist's free play of the mind and personal responses to the observed subjects of study was affirmed forty years later, during the time Hurston was his student. In his 1928 work Anthropology and Modern Life, Boas reiterated that the social sciences must be based solely on the study of "observed phenomena," and he went on to articulate that

the scientific study of generalized social forms requires therefore, that the investigator free himself from all valuations based on [his] culture. An objective, strictly scientific inquiry can be made only if we succeed in entering into each culture on its own basis. (201)

Later claims were made by ethnographers for the objective, unintrusive and depersonalized form of "author image," to use Bakhtin's concept. Susan Sontag has pointed out that Claude Levi-Strauss's insistence that anthropology was a science, rather than a humanistic study, had ramifications for the presentation of the self in his works. "Structural anthropology," she wrote in 1963, "aims towards this, by obliterating all traces of the anthropologist's personal experience . . . through rigorous formalism" (77).

According to these standards, Mules and Men, with its highly visible, intensely subjective, and active narrator and distinctly felt "author image," appears to be a willful violation of long-held and persistent attitudes to social-scientific writing. Yet it is now possible, I think, to view Hurston's work as a striking prefiguration of theories articulated in Clifford Geertz's recent writings about the limitations of Boasian attitudes toward ethnography. (This even goes beyond what Hemenway astutely points out as Hurston's rejection of the insistent rationality of the dominant European-American culture [213]). Geertz recognizes that anthropological texts cannot, and should not, aspire to ideals of scientific objectivity and author-evacuated field reporting governed by rigorous methodological attitudes. By making this claim, Geertz has significantly contributed to the debate over the nature of anthropology and its texts. He has argued for the essential fictionality of ethnography and has shown how anthropological texts are receptive to literary, as much as scientific, analysis. Geertz contends that these texts are fictions, in the nonpejorative sense that they are "something made, something fashioned - the original meaning of fiction - not that they are false, unfactual or merely |as if' thought experiments" (Local 15). That is to say, anthropology requires the kinds of imaginative acts necessary to create fictional literature; both require a "making." From a rhetorical standpoint, Geertz also emphasizes that ethnographic texts do not persuade through the marshaling of facts and details, as has been traditionally accepted, nor do they persuade through their theoretical arguments (Works 3-4). Like a novel or a poem, ethnography depends for its truth value on the

capacity to convince us that what [ethnographers] say is a result of their having actually penetrated (or if you prefer, been penetrated by) another form of life, of having, one way or another, truly "been there." (Works 4-5)

Perhaps the strongest statement of this postmodern recognition of the essentially fictive nature of the social sciences is Roy Wagner's The Invention of Culture. This work's thesis is that every culture, including the anthropologist's own, is "invented." "An anthropologist |invents' the culture he believes himself to be studying" (qtd. in Brown 16). More than this, authorial presence in ethnography is, as Geertz has argued, inescapable. The author's presence tends to be relegated, like other embarrassments, to prefaces, notes or appendices" (Works 16). "But in one way or another, however unreflexively and with whatever misgivings about the propriety of it, ethnographers all manage" to get themselves into their texts. "There are," Geertz contends, "some very dull books in anthropology, but few if any anonymous murmurs" (Works 17).

Hurston's unabashed self-inscription in Mules and Men demonstrates that she, perhaps alone of her contemporaries, seems to have recognized, at some level, the illusory nature of "the effort to create a formal vocabulary of analysis purged of all subjective reference," as Geertz sums up a foundational assumption of mainstream social science (Local 34). The mutually interdependent sources of inspiration for her fiction and her ethnography(10) are related to another point Geertz makes. The objective status of anthropological knowledge is not necessarily "social reality but scholarly artifice" (16). Now Hurston was a product of her training under Boas: She praised her mentor's "genius for pure objectivity" in her autobiography (182), and she expressed anxious concern in her letters to him that Mules and Men was not so scientific as he would have liked. Yet she also knew the difficulties inherent in writing "scientific texts from biographical experiences," which is the fundamental dilemma of the ethnographer's discipline, as Geertz has pointed out (Works 14). He speaks of the ethnographer as an Olympian scientist who is also possessed of the sovereign consciousness of the hyperauthorial novelist. Small wonder then that most ethnographers tend to oscillate uncertainly between the two, sometimes in different books, more often in the same one" (Works 10). Hurston expressed an awareness of this dilemma in Boas's presence but she nevertheless resolved it by unashamedly inscribing herself into the text of Mules and Men in ways that valorized both her personal identity as an African-American woman and her professional identity as a serious and purposeful ethnographer. By refiguring ethnographic discourse in her own, and her own culture's, image, she is nothing if not certain about her place in the work. The extent to which she participates in the action she describes is not unique to the ethnological writing of her time, but the presentation of herself as a strong ordering force in the text is. The objects of her study are, thus, often minimized; instead the subjective presence of the ethnographer is privileged in many different ways.

For example, she is actively sought out by her informants, the storytellers, instead of the reverse, which is the norm in anthropological field study. A character in her home town of Eatonville, Florida, remarks that Hurston looks as if she's bored by what she is hearing and he urges the rest of the group to tell better stories, or "lies" as they are called, in order to hold her interest: "Zora's gittin' restless. She think she ain't gointer hear no more" (43). At the opening of the second chapter, Eatonville storytellers such as George Thomas and Charlie Jones appeal to her to come and listen:

"Zora," Ceorge Thomas informed me, "you come to de right place if lies is what you want. Ah'm gointer lie up a nation." Charlie Jones said, "Yeah man Me an my sworn buddy Gene Brazzle is here. Big Moose done come down from de mountain" "Now, you gointer hear lies above suspicion," Gene added.(37)

It is almost as if her presence is required for this rich oral culture to come into being. In the introduction to the work she writes, "Here in Eatonville I knew everybody was going to help me" collect the folktales which form the basis of her study (19).

A standard trope of ethnography, as Carl G. Herndl recently pointed out, is" |the arrival story,' the poetic description of the ethnographer entering the native scene. This trope establishes the fieldworker's presence, authorizes her account, and then allows her to recede from" the description that follows, subsequently suppressing the writer's genuine participation throughout the remainder of the text in order to establish the "scientific" authority of the "observation" (325). Hurston revels in her own "arrival stories," without, however, subsequently fading into the background. At the very opening of Mules and Men, the townspeople introduce and name her to the reader, thereby making "Zora Hurston" the subject of the work. As she rolls into Eatonville in her Chevrolet, "They looked up from the game and for a moment it looked as if they had forgotten me. Then B. Moseley said, |Well if it ain't Zora Hurston!' Then everybody crowded around the car to help greet me" (23). They eagerly ask her how long she plans to stay among them and with whom she plans to stay. She allows her informants to comment on her potentially disruptive presence in Eatonville: "|No, Zora ain't goin' nowhere wid my husband,' Clara announced. |If he got anything to tell her - it's gointer be right here in front of me'" (55). And the great disparity between her initial identity as an "insider" who is named to the reader by her own townspeople and her later one as a threatening "outsider" who, after leaving the security of Eatonville, must work to establish her legitimacy as an "insider" in Polk County is the focus of much of her commentary. This is especially vivid in the descriptions of her incongruously urban appearance when she first arrives in the lumber camps to gather folklore (89-90). Her "arrival story" in Loughman, Polk County, is fancifully delivered as she and her "little Chevrolet" together form a "we" who "debate" where to go (85) and may have made the wrong decision:

That night the place was full of men - come to look over the new addition to the quarters. Very little was said directly to me and when I tried to be friendly there was a noticeable disposition to fend me off. This worried me because I saw at once that this group of several hundred Negroes from all over the South was rich field for folk-lore, but here I was figuratively starving to death in the midst of plenty. (85-86)

This is one of many references in the text to the occupational hazards of ethnology, as she inscribes herself as a focal point of community conflict in the Loughman, Polk County, lumber camps and "jooks."

Yet even before others have introduced the ethnographer to us, or had the opportunity to begin telling their stories, she lets the reader know of the folktales she had heard as "Lucy Hurston's daughter, Zora" (17). In fact, in the introduction to Mules and Men, it is she who tells the very first story in the collection. Suitably enough, it is a comical creation myth - one about God's creation of the human soul (19). Though she does surrender the folktelling function in the follow-on narrative entitled "Folk Tales," allowing her subjects' voices to come to the forefront, it is she who steps in from time to time to tell us the townspeople's reactions to each story, much as the poet does in The Canterbury Tales to remind the reader of his presence in the narrative superstructure connecting the tales. To cite just one example, after Eugene Oliver and Black Baby have outdone each other telling exaggerated anecdotes describing the biggest insects they've seen, Hurston states, "Everybody liked to hear about the mosquito. They laughed all over themselves" (135).

How the folk react to Hurston as she assumes and plays out various roles is of equal importance, however. This is particularly noticeable in the scenes set in the Polk County, Florida, lumber camps where she is forced to disguise herself as a bootlegger "on the lam" in order to obtain the confidence of her initially suspicious informants. The problem is not that they take her for a lofty scholar but for, she says, "a revenue officer or detective of some kind" (86). How she becomes an "insider" is the focus of much of Mules and Men, and the text thereby enters the realm of metaethnography. That is to say, Hurston writes ethnography about the problematic aspects of writing ethnography, but not in the accepted scientific way of carefully detailing how results were obtained in a field study from a methodological standpoint. Instead, the focus is very much - in an overtly personal way - on her initial exclusion from her subjects; her subsequent friendship with Big Sweet, a figure of female power in the community of storytellers which gradually accepts the ethnologist, and her eventual success as a field researcher: Having made a very fine and full collection on the Saw-Mill Camp," she feels "no regrets at shoving off" from Loughman, Florida (197).

In the "Hoodoo" section, Hurston seems to be very consciously inscribing herself as some type of occult figure, further establishing herself as the focal point of subjectively experienced folkloric culture. Instead of providing objective, distanced reportage of voodoo and conjure rituals in New Orleans, she focuses her writing on her reaction to the events she is participating in. It is, quite literally, sensational anthropology. She avers, "I had five psychic experiences" in one sixty-nine-hour initiation rite "and awoke at last with no feeling of hunger, only one of exultation" (247). Her naked body itself becomes a kind of runic ethnographic text in this same rite (illustrated in a highly stylized Art Deco depiction by the book's illustrator, Miguel Covarrubias, of contemporary Vanity Fair fame). She is renamed "The Rain-Bringer" by a conjure artist, Luke Turner, a supposed nephew of Marie Leveau, who paints a yellow lighting symbol down her back "from my right sholder to my left hip. This was to be my sign forever. The Great One was to speak to me in storms" (249). Her face is also decorated with a symbolic sun and a pair of iconographic eyes as part of the ceremony, as a result of which she is worthy to be "taken by the Spirit."

Hurston's critics have noted that all this emphasis on the self placing itself in sensationalized roles strains the credulity of readers expecting rigorous social science. But they miss the point that Geertz makes in his essay titled "Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought." The acknowledgment that no discourse is generically pure has meant "a challenge is being mounted to some of the central assumptions of mainstream social science. The strict separation of theory and data, the |brute fact' idea, the effort to create . . . analysis purged of all subjective reference" in anthropology texts was always illusory (Local 34). The value of Hurston's work is that it helps us recognize this. The metaphorizing tendencies of more recent ethnography, as if anthropologists were as much steeped in poetry and drama as social science, as Geertz has noted in Works and Lives, are present in Mules and Men to a degree that would not unduly disturb such social scientists as Victor Turner and Alton Becker. They have refigured social thought along such models as "life-as-theatre" and "life-as-game" respectively (Local 23).

Hurston's ludic tendency to metaphorize the ethnographer's identity reaches its final apotheosis in Mules and Men when the author herself, functioning as the final story-telling voice in the collection, concludes the book, just as she began, with a folk myth. This story also has relevance to Hurston's identity as a creative artist and ethnographer. The tale, which functions as an epilogue, recounts the reason for cats' washing themselves after they eat, rather than before. After being hoodwinked by the rat (here functioning as a male trickster figure) as she was about to eat him, Sis Cat learns from experience that she must eat the rat while she has him in her clutches and worry later about the polite niceties of washing herself. The story ends this way:

So de cat caught herself a rat again and set down to eat. So de Rat said, "Where's yo' manners at, Sis Cat? You going to eat |thout washing yo' face and hands?"

"Oh, Ah got plenty manners," de cat told 'im. "But Ah eats mah dinner and washes mah face and uses mah manners afterwards." So she et right on 'im and washed her face and hands. And cat's been washin' after eatin' ever since. (304)

I think it's significant that this final story should be about female empowerment through experience, wit, and independent and unconventional thought and behavior. Moreover, Hurston appropriates the story for her own final act of self-inscription, assuming Sis Cat's identity in the final paragraph of her ethnography and expressing it in the vernacular: "I'm sitting here like Sis Cat, washing my face and usin' my manners" (304). Adopting this feline persona, Hurston has, in essence, compared herself to a folktale character, one eminently worthy of emulation. Hence, Mules and Men ends on a creatively affirmative act of self-mythification.

Hurston's contribution to the process of "blurring genres" in Mules and Men is, I hope I have shown, of the greatest significance. Yet, in the final analysis, it is not so surprising. She did so for expressive and personal reasons, but also as a way of subverting pernicious racist assumptions by social scientists and their "fictions" about her people. Many recent feminist critics have noted the tendency in African-American women's writing to elude definitional or generic specificity, much as Hurston herself does in the photograph reproduced on p. 607. Barbara Johnson has expressed this idea well when writing apropos of Their Eyes Were Watching God:

The inside/outside boundaries between character and narrator, between standard and individual, are both transgressed and preserved, making it impossible to identify and totalize either the subject or the nature of the discourse (218).

Astute critics have commented on this aspect of Hurston's fiction. I think it is possible to see the same transgressions enriching Mules and Men, as well. Her final assumption of a feline identity, Sis Cat, is the culmination of an empowering self-transformation throughout the course of the work which takes on a palpably magic-like character. With this power, Hurston has assumed the authority to speak, as an ethnographer, for her people in a way that can, in turn, empower her subjects. Majorie Pryse has stated that Hurston was a key figure in the assertion of a self-conscious and powerful "voice" in African-American culture and women's writing:

By writing down black folklore in a form that made it accessible for the first time to general readers [she] called an abrupt halt to the cultural attitude that excluded black women from literature because it excluded them from other kinds of power. Mules and Men used the power of the written text itself as form of magic. (11)

Pryse goes on to echo Alice Walker's establishment of Hurston as a founding mother" of an African-American women's literary tradition, as vital to her culture and race as the Bible was to the white male colonists of seventeenth-century New England. Hurston's ethnographic work gave her the power to "tell stories because in the act of writing down the old |lies,' Hurston created a bridge between the |primitive' authority of folk life and the literary power of written texts" (11). In Mules and Men Hurston invested herself with what Pryse calls the "magic of authority" (12) that makes storytelling possible. To tell a different story from that told by her contemporary social scientists - this was the imperative of Hurston's ethnographic work.

While Hurston "blurred genres" to celebrate and valorize both her own identity and that of her culture, other social scientists, using strenuously "scientific" writing, usually derogated African-American culture as pathological, if they acknowledged the existence of an autonomous culture at all. Let me cite just one of many egregious examples to show the degree to which Hurston's brand of ethnography stood in oppositional relation to what was supposedly rational, objective Establishment Social Science in the 1930s. The preeminent sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, as John F. Szwed has stated, used racist statistical surveys in his field research which lacked "any ethnographically-based insight into black life," while his work described African-American communities as "disorganized and culturally non-adaptive" (Szwed 159). In a study entitled "Traditions and Patterns of Negro Family Life in the United States," published the year before Mules and Men, Frazier concluded:

To be sure, when one undertakes the study of the Negro he discovers a great poverty of traditions and patterns of behavior that exercise any real influence on the formation of the Negro's personality and conduct. If . . . the most striking thing about the Chinese is their deep culture, the most conspicuous thing about the Negro is his lack of a culture. (qtd. in Szwed 159)

As Szwed points out, the established consensus of American social scientists between the wars, and well into the 1960s," was that African-Americans were part of "a deficit culture, a kind of negative culture existing in the absence of a real one" (160). Positioning itself in the interstices of this Establishment edifice, Hurston's Mules and Men was the first full-length work to give the lie to "scientific" sensus, arguing for the persistence and continuity of a distinctive African-American culture and tradition. She did this even before such relatively enlightened social scientists as fellow Boas student Melville Herskovits (The Myth of the Negro Past, 1941) and linguist Lorenzo D. Turner (Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, 1949). Hurston's ethnography is significant because it portrays a highly actualized culture creating and passing on richly distinctive narrative and ritual traditions.

Sis Cat successfully broke free of her mentor's dictates that the ethnographer distance herself from her subjects. "The emancipation from our own culture, demanded of the anthropologist, is not easily attained," Boas wrote in 1928, the year after Hurston's first return to her Eatonville home as a field researcher, "because we are only too apt to consider the behavior in which we are bred as natural for all mankind, as one that must necessarily develop everywhere'"(202). Hurston surely sensed that an African-American woman valorizing herself and her people had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by emancipating herself from her own culture via Boas's idealized tenets of "rigid, objective study" (204). Thus Hurston was the first to close the gap between the subject of ethnography and its audience, which Geertz has posited as a necessary concomitant of postcolonial anthropology. The belief that ethnographic "subjects were to be described but not addressed, or the audience informed but not implicated" (Works 132) is a normative value of traditional anthropology which Hurston did not, and could not, embody. From a purely rhetorical standpoint, Mules and Men is a fully persuasive work of ethnography. As Mary Helen Washington has movingly attested of its fundamental truth value,

The tales are set in the framework of a story in which Hurston herself is a character. The other characters, who in conventional folklore collections are merely informants, are real personalities in Mules and Men, exposing their prejudices, love affairs, jealousies . . . . She saw black lives as psychologically integral - not half-lives, stunted by the effects of racism and poverty. (Washington, Introduction 14)

On a personal level, too, Hurston's self-transformative poses - from "Zora Hurston" of Eatonville to "The Rain-Bringer" of New Orleans to her final assertions of professional accomplishment and personal power as Sis Cat - trace, in Cheryl A. Wall's apt words, "the journey of the artist who travels both to the matrix of the culture and to the deepest regions of her self. Having completed this dual journey, she is empowered to tell her story to the world" (676). Significantly, Zora Neale Hurston's transmutation of social science in Mules and Men embodies Stephen A. Tyler's marvelously apt description of ethnography: "an occult document . . . an enigmatic, paradoxical, and esoteric conjunction of moty and fantasy" (qtd. in Geertz, Works 137).

Notes

(1) Hurston's flamboyantly self-dramatizing theatricality in social settings is nicely detailed by Hemenway 22ff. (2) Both Mules and Men and the 1938 account of her research in Jamaica and Haiti, Tell My Horse, have recently been described by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as "her classic anthropological works" (207). (3) Hemenway has given us the most sustained critical evaluation of her approach to folklore research and writing, viewing it through the prism of her entire creative career. However, there has been little effort to place Hurston in the larger social-scientific context out of which her academic training as an anthropologist emerged. Hurston's own expression of her place in American anthropology in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road is characteristically "mock-humble" yet ultimately unrevealing (like so much in this work). After she lists her association with the American Folklore Society, the American Ethnological Society, and the American Anthropological Society, she remarks: "So to me these honors meant something . . . . it was a long step for the wait of Eatonville" to have been invited to join these professional organizations (179-80). (4) Walker writes, in her foreword to Hemenway, that Mules and Men is full of stories of "an inventive, joyous, courageous and outrageous people: loving drama, appreciating wit and, most of all, relishing the pleasure of each other's loquacious and bodacious company"(xii). (5) See, for example, Washington's inverted Lives, Smith, and Carby. (6) For further details on the difficulties of this relationship, see Hemenway, ch. 5 "Godmother and Big Sweet." Carby also mentions the highly problematic nature of patronage in the Harlem Renaissance (165-66). (7) The foreword by "Franz Boas, Ph.D., LL.D." (as the itte page of the 1935 edition valorizes his professional qualifications) is interesting because he praises Hurston's work as valuable to students of cultural history," rather than putting his imprimatur, in direct terms, on Mules and Men as a scientific work of social anthropology (8). Mary V. Dearborn observantly remarks that traditionally, ethnic women's writing has usually been "mediated" by devices such as prefaces, appendices, glossaries, and annotations which "serve to |translate' the foreignness of the ethnic experience for the dominant culture, to guarantee the author's ethnicity, and often, in the last analysis, to make the text more accessible to the reader" (36). Dearborn avers that this authenticating mediation is performed, more often than not, by a "non-ethnic" man. This is certainly the dynamic at work in Mules and Men, which on closer inspection seems rendered less, rather than more, "scientific" by the superimposition of such textual appurtenances. (8) Many of the favorable critical notices which her work received stressed Hurston's "entertainment value." For example, Lewis Gannett wrote,"I can't remember anything better since |Uncle Remus'" (12). (9) See, for example, Hurston's letter to Boas (20 Aug 1934) qtd. in Hemenway 163-64. (10) One of the many truly marvelous examples of the folkloric influence at work in her fiction is the call-and-response of the "impatent buzzards" after the mock funeral for Matt Bonner's mule in Their Eyes Were Watching God, ch. 6. (11) Social-scientific orthodoxy even in the Civil Rights era derogated African-American culture. For instance, Glazer and Moynihan's immensely influential Beyond the Melting Pot (1963) asserted the view that "the Negro has no values and culture to guard and protect" (qtd. in Szwed 160).

Works Cited

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D. A. Boxwell is Assistant Professor of English at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.