Zora Neale Hurston and Visual Anthropology

Abstract

In 1925, shortly after arriving in New York City, Zora Neale Hurston enrolled in Barnard College. There she studied anthropology under the mentorship Franz Boas, an opportunity that also fostered close working relationships with Melville Herskovits and Margaret Meade (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies entry Zora Neale Hurston). During this time Boas, along with white patrons such as Charlotte Osgood Mason and African American institutional leaders such as Carter G. Woodson, sponsored Hurston’s fieldwork. At the behest of Boas, Hurston famously recorded anthropometric measurements of African Americans in Harlem and under the direction of Woodson she traveled to Alabama in 1927 to record the story of Cudjo Lewis, the last-known living survivor of the Middle Passage. Upon graduating, Hurston returned to the American South with the directive to collect oral history, folklore, music, and accounts of everyday black life. As she traveled through Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana, Hurston kept meticulous written and visual documentation of the stories she heard, quotidian habits that she observed, and the rituals she bore witness to. Together, Hurston’s formal disciplinary training and her investment in the study of black culture engendered a unique perspective on black “folk” life informing an experimental methodology that would direct much of her research and writing for the first half of her career. Scholars working in fields as diverse as African American studies, literary studies, and anthropology have long recognized Zora Neale Hurston as a pioneering anthropologist who deftly negotiated her desire to produce an authentic account of African American folk culture, the disciplinary boundaries of early-20th-century anthropology, and her own subject position. In addition to announcing a method of participant observation that blurs the line between objectivity and subjectivity and between the documentary and the imaginative, Hurston was also an innovator of visual anthropology who labored to visualize the complexities of African American life. To do so, she mobilized visual approaches to study anthropological subjects (such as photography and film) and saw visual culture as worthy of social scientific study. Beginning in 1928, Hurston regularly recorded footage of the communities that she lived among and studied. While she initially shot the film herself on a 16mm handheld camera, she eventually commissioned a professional team to capture footage of quotidian black life (see also Wagers 2013, cited under Film and Photography). Hurston also regularly photographed her subjects. These images made their way into her writing, as is the case of Tell My Horse, but just as often they remained unpublished. Likewise, Hurston deployed visual metaphors such as the “spy glass” to describe her precarious position as a trained anthropologist studying black folk life. The extant visual record blurs the line between seemingly objective and imaginative, between narrative and scientific, and between evidentiary and entertainment. Recognizing Hurston as a pioneering visual anthropologist nuances the robust body of scholarship on her literary practice and the steadily growing research that aims to secure Hurston’s key contributions to the field of anthropology.