Comparison Of Kpomassie And Zora Neale Hurston

Anthropology has been a field of study throughout the ages which humans have utilized to achieve their goal of better understanding each other and better understanding the different cultures throughout this vast world. Zora Neale Hurston and Tété-Michel Kpomassie are just two of the many who have made use of this field of study in the hopes of broadening their minds. I will compare the focus of observation and ethnographic approach of these two people, who were courageous enough to act out on their curiosities, and call to mind the differences and/similarities in ethnographic approach and focus of observation with regards to their texts Of Mules and Men and An African in Greenland (Hurston and Kpomassie respectively), using only chapters one

she is just purely a brilliant writer and 2. The text as a whole is divided into two parts; the first part where she goes to Eatonville and Florida collection folktales and the second part which is where she goes to New Orleans to study on the practice of “hoodoo”. In the first part (Of Mules and Men) her focus of observation is African-American folktales and how they have evolved over time. This is strange to me because usually folktales are filled with so much fantasy that it is difficult to believe them, but she goes anyway to these two places (Eatonville, Florida) and gathers these folktales. Whilst I was in my quest for insight I found out that Hurston actually grew up in Eatonville after her family moved there due to racial complications in the town that (her and her family) were previously living (Alabama), and she supports this when she says “I was delighted. The town had not changed. Same love of talk and song” (Hurston, 1935, p.7). It is known that she really loved living in Eatonville and often regarded it as her place of birth. I believe that it is for this very reason that her focus of observation is the culture of the African-American people with regards to their folktales as well as their practice of hoodoo. She need not observe the living people of Eatonville as she comes from there; she is a person of Eatonville so instead she studies something she felt was where her

Other than the fact that Kpomassie disliked being in a single area for long periods of time, he fled to Europe with the prospect of escaping the clenches of a python cult from where he was from (Rural Togo). In conjunction with being drawn to Europe to escape him also had this immense interest and fascination with Greenland as it didn’t have snakes nor did it have trees in which the snakes could possibly hide in and he was also fascinated with the Inuit. I believe that it is for this reason that his focus of observation is the people themselves in general which includes their cultures, their practices, their religion; just their way of life holistically and not solely just a specific practice of theirs like Hurston. I believe they differ because of their ethnicity firstly, because Hurston goes back to her hometown there’s not much more she could possibly uncover with regards to the people themselves and how they are as a society whereas Kpomassie goes to a completely different place from where he is from; this place being different in almost every way including climate and culture. Reading this piece I found that Kpomassie has an (unintentional) ethnocentricity to him. He comes into Europe already expecting the culture to be