"Sis Cat" as Ethnographer: Self-Presentation and Self-Inscription in Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men

Abstract

One of most striking photographs ever taken of an African-American woman writer can be found in 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 Chevrolet she used on her folklore-collecting travels throughout American South in late 1920s. arresting thing about this photographic 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 camera eye, very much in her performance mode, with her hands on her hips, thumbs assertively on belt, feet firmly planted on ground. Looking up to her right, she has a jaunty smile that might best be described cocksure (see Fig. 1 on p. 607).(1) I begin with a description of this photograph because, in The Problem of Text, Mikhail Bakhtin writes of image in visual and literary works of art. This is what allows viewer or reader to feel presence of artist even though author is not a depicted, or visual, image, she would be, say, in a photograph. image is produced by writer in some sense entering text as part of (109). problem, Bakhtin sees it, of in which [the author] is expressed in a (109) is of interest to reader of first of Zora Neale Hurston's two book-length works of ethnography, Mules and Men, first published in October 1935.(2) visible in photograph I have just described seems consciously replicated by Hurston image -maker and self-inscriber, and it is this problem which has hindered a sympathetic understanding of Hurston's achievement an ethnographer for decades. Critics of ethnography have anxiously questioned how far author can go in depicting him/herself an in writing which, aspiring to scientific discourse, has traditionally attempted to deny or suppress 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, constraints of complying with 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, Hortense Spillers has recently expressed it, pernicious distinctions that separate academy vs. vernacular, the scholar vs. folk, and ivory tower vs. 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 last two decades. Indeed, her work cultural critic, too, has received a kind of canonization by her inclusion in recent anthology Gender of Modernism, a significant revisionary assertion about crucial role played by European, European-American, and African-American women in development of High Modernism before 1930. Yet, for all that, Hurston's work a professional folklorist and ethnologist in a context beyond 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 stable ground of traditional anthropology by ways in which she presents self in act of participating in, and subsequently recording, folklore event. Mary Helen Washington has pointed out that one of main preoccupations of black woman writer is black woman herself (qtd. in Baker and Redmond 53), but this preoccupation with self in forms of discourse outside realm of creative arts has been a problematic factor in any assessment of fun scope of Hurston's achievements. …