Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was an American writer and anthropologist who trained under Franz Boas at Columbia University and conducted pioneering ethnographic fieldwork on African American and Caribbean folklore, religion, and vernacular culture. In Mules and Men (1935) she documented African American folktales, songs, and hoodoo practices in Florida and New Orleans using methods that combined literary narrative voice with ethnographic observation, and in Tell My Horse (1938) she extended this fieldwork to Haitian and Jamaican Vodou. Hurston's insistence on presenting Black vernacular speech, belief, and expressive culture on its own terms, without translating it into more conventional academic idiom, distinguished her ethnographic method from that of her Boasian contemporaries and gave her folklore collections lasting value as both anthropology and literature.