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: She began accumulating literary successes while studying at Howard University, and after her first nationally published short story appeared in 1924, she was prompted to join Harlem’s “New Negro” movement.” She transferred to Barnard, a women’s college affiliated with Columbia University. After training there with Franz Boas, Hurston would, in 1928, become Barnard’s first black graduate. Under Boas’ tutelage and supported by the patronage of white benefactors, Hurston traveled throughout the US South and to Haiti, Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Honduras, documenting cultural and religious traditions. Hurston’s famous quote, from her study of African American folklore, Mules and Men, sums up what drew her to anthropology: “ It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings that I could see myself like somebody else . . . Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through at that” (p. 3). Inventive across numerous genres, Hurston’s constant genius was her unmatched ability to impart the oral traditions of rural black southerners, using their voices to advance Boas’s salvaging mission, blur the borders between fiction and ethnography, and maintain that black expression was worthy of anthropological analysis. Hurston’s later life was plagued by controversy, poverty, and isolation. Although she fearlessly celebrated black culture at a time when its most sympathetic proponents viewed it as exotic, Hurston’s political beliefs were sometimes at odds with black political movements—she opposed the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling.