Creating Ethnography: Zora Neale Hurston and Lydia Cabrera

African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Lynda Hoffman-Jeep

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell within. (Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road 127)

In comparing the collections of folktales by Zora Neale Hurston and Lydia Cabrera published throughout 1935 and 1936, one has to negotiate the professional, cultural, and personal forces that make creative forms possible, maybe even inevitable. Both women worked from multiple planes of identification: it is a challenge to pinpoint their professional roles as "native" and feminist ethnographers within the scholarly ethnographic tradition in which they were both trained and, in Hurston's case, professionally sidelined. In Mules and Men and Cuentos negros, respectively, Hurston and Cabrera display creative ethnographic strategies as part of their response to the scholarly tradition, thereby rising to multilayered professional and personal challenges.

James Clifford has unveiled the mystique of the ethnographer by carefully explaining the artistry and invention involved in ethnographic writing. Beyond the perhaps unconscious but still intentional recreation of a culture by the ethnographer, Clifford points out further that "interpreters constantly construct themselves through the others they study" (10). An ethnography that recreates a culture, while at the same time inscribing the self, requires from the investigator both physical distance and intense proximity. Recreating a culture can be a conscious attempt by the ethnographer to bring again to life in writing that culture which he or she has experienced firsthand. A recreation of a culture differs considerably from a sometimes sterile, analytical description of a people or group. Compare, for example, Hurston's Mules and Men (1936), as a cultural recreation, with Marcel Mauss's The Gift (1925) as an analytical and descriptive study. The dichotomy of distance and proximity may entail physical travel to a specific geographic site and/or an intellectual or emotional "journey" through memory, in order to establish the psychological distance prerequisite for achieving perspective and, oddly enough, what we call insight. Crucial here is the paradoxical and yet fundamental role that physical and emotional distances play in facilitating insight and recognition, while simultaneously promoting a scholar's self-construction.

Combinations of memory "travel" and on-site ethnographic information collection by the Cuban writer, artist, and ethnographer Lydia Cabrera and the US American writer and ethnographer Zora Neale Hurston yielded published collections of Afro-Cuban and African American folktales within six months of one another in 1935 and 1936. (1) These women, although from completely divergent backgrounds, had uncannily similar moments of recognition and insight concerning a minority culture that was not entirely their own, at approximately the same time, but in two separate locations. While plotting out the journeys that paved the way for their creative and innovative work in Afro-Cuban and African American ethnography, this study will address their bifocal vision as insider-outsiders within the minority cultures they represent in folktales and within the "foreign" cultures to which they traveled. Cabrera's and Hurston's roles as "native ethnographers" will also be considered. In creating alternatives to traditional ethnographies, such as Franz Boas's Bella Bella Tales (1932), their collections can be understood as early examples of experimental and feminist ethnography.

Origins and Journeys

Lydia Cabrera, born in Cuba in 1900, was the eighth and youngest child of a prominent white Havana family. For a woman of her time and culture, she received an excellent education both from private tutors and by attending the San Alejandro Art Academy in Havana without her parents' knowledge. Studying on her own, Cabrera was able to pass the rigorous Cuban baccalaureat exams (Simo 7). During her childhood and adolescence, there were numerous family trips to Europe and New York, where Cabrera enjoyed more freedom of movement than patriarchal Havana afforded her. At the age of 14, she published her first pieces in Cuba y America, her father's prestigious political and literary magazine (Simo 6). (2) When she was 20, Cabrera threatened to take her own life with a gun held to her head if her father would not agree to let her study at the Sorbonne. Raimundo Cabrera agreed to his daughter's study abroad with a compromise: the entire family would move to Paris for five years so that Lydia could pursue her studies. Such was the life of a wealthy Cuban family in the 1920s. Raimundo Cabrera died in 1923 on Lydia's twenty-third birthday, before the plan could be carried out.

Cabrera faced this setback with characteristic determination. She organized a successful art exhibit of Cuban decorative and fine arts in the Convent of Santa Clara (Havana) and established a furniture business with two partners in order to save enough money to finance her own education. Finally, four years after her father's death, Cabrera sold her share of the business and sailed for Europe. She was accompanied by her mother, and the Cuban painter Amelia Pelaez (1896-1968), for whom she had obtained a government scholarship (Simo 8). (3)