Title: Zora Neale Hurston - Anthropology - Oxford Bibliographies
Headings: 
Zora Neale Hurston
by
Oneka LaBennett
LAST MODIFIED: 28 November 2016
DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0160
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Content: The efforts of writers and scholars such as Walker, Robert Hemenway, Mary Helen Washington, Carla Kaplan, Henry Louis Gates, and Anthony Kwame Appiah have helped to establish Hurston’s place in the literary canon. In anthropology, Irma McClaurin has been a tireless proponent of recognizing Hurston’s contributions. The following overview reveals that Hurston’s interdisciplinary approach to fiction, folklore, and autobiographical writing has had immeasurable influence on a host of writers and scholars working in fields as diverse as anthropology, fiction writing, literary criticism, religious studies, and African and African American studies. Hurston’s corpus of fiction, ethnography, folklore, plays, and short stories reveals that no matter the disciplinary entry point of the analyst, one cannot discuss Hurston’s fiction without acknowledging her ethnographic perspective. Concomitantly, one cannot assess her ethnographic contributions without situating them alongside her fiction. These overlapping approaches have meant that her work resonates with and has informed scholars from multiple disciplines. As McClaurin 2001 and Visweswaran 1994 (cited under Black Feminist and Women of Color Anthropology) reveal, Hurston deeply impacted feminists and black anthropologists. Yet, Hurston’s anthropological work remains outside the field’s canon, which is still largely centered on the legacy of white men. Although Hurston’s contemporaries criticized her for explicitly keeping politics out of her work and for neglecting to engage directly with racism, McClaurin 2001 notes that a generation of feminist and black anthropologists working within the realms of scholar-activism, native anthropology, and applied anthropology have traced their lineage through Hurston. Experimental trends in feminist anthropology in the late 1990s drew on Hurston to explore blurred lines between fiction and ethnography, and the possibilities of “autoethnography” (blending autobiography and ethnography).