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: 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. After a false allegation of sexual misconduct against a minor—although the charges were dropped—Hurston’s reputation was damaged, and her increasingly conservative politics contributed to her exclusion from literary circles. Upon her death on 28 January 1960 she was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida. Her work was out of print for thirty-five years when in 1975, author Alice Walker revitalized interest in her with an essay that established Hurston as Walker’s literary ancestor and recounted Walker’s excursion to place a gravestone where she believed Hurston was buried. Although Hurston’s work has not been canonized in anthropology, her oeuvre demonstrates early innovations in numerous areas including “native” anthropology, autoethnography, and African diasporic studies, and her citations reveal an indelible mark on feminist and black anthropologists. General Overviews
Most of the extensive writing on Hurston falls within the confines of literary criticism, Gates and Appiah 1993, Lowe 1996, or literary biography Hemenway 1980 (cited under Biographies) and Boyd 2003 (cited under Biographies ).