Hurston's Ethnography Analysis

This is my first reading of Hurston’s ethnographic work and it has been quite an introduction to a very unique voice and style and methods. My first impression was, admittedly, that of both wonder and irritation. I marveled at the amount of rich material found between the covers. The characters are so fleshed out, the background (such as her hometown) so well imagined that yes, it felt at times I was reading a work of fiction (which Boxwell picks up on later). The expansive cast of supporting characters are so well-portrayed that their interactions threaten to steal the reader’s attention away from the folklore (are they truths? are they lies?) I kept wondering through the first half of this compelling research just how she had the time

I kept thinking how, in doing so, Hurston adds to our prior discussion about auto-ethnography and the idea of proximity to the research material. Whereas Snorton seemed very measured and Anderson perhaps shares too intimately, Hurston somehow takes her position even closer, situating herself as both the data collector and data sharer herself, (3-5; 245-246). By the time she is undergoing various initiation rites as a potential Hoodoo priestess (Part 2, Hoodoo) she has both literally and figuratively immersed herself in her target

Throughout Mules and Men I felt a tension between the indigenous community Hurston was observing (and participating in) with Western anthropological values and aesthetics – for instance, the reliance on hoodoo, the mixed messages of morality that some of the folk tales, brought, etc. Knudson reminds us that in incorporating indigenous voices, we need to be aware that they may not sit easily – or, indeed, at all – in the same room (or in the same research) with western epistemologies (3). I felt that palpable tension throughout Hurston’s work, hearing in my brain the academic critics challenging the storytellers’ logic, the Hoodoo priests, the origin of the religion – and even Hurston