Creating Ethnography: Zora Neale Hurston and Lydia Cabrera

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

Both Cabrera and Hurston had to distance themselves physically and geographically from their cultural homes before they could recognize the value of the respective folklore surrounding them, and exploit its potential value for educated and interested readers. As Hazel Carby argues, "The desire of the Harlem intellectuals [of whom Hurston was one] to establish and re-present African American cultural authenticity to a predominantly white audience was a mark of change from, and confrontation with, what were seen by them to be externally imposed cultural representations of black people produced within, and supported by, a racialized social order" (74). Hurston's maneuvering of insider/ outsider positions is bound by discourses of race, gender, and education, with varying degrees of impact and influence. Carby sees in Hurston's formal training as an anthropologist the possibility that the Harlemite could have returned to rural Florida, not in the guise of a bootlegger, but as a listener and reporter: "In her fictional return, Hurston represents the tensions inherent in her position as an intellectual--in particular as a writer--in antagonistic relation to her construction of the folk community. [Thus, Carby] think[s] Hurston is as concerned with the production of a sense of self as she is with the representation of a folk consciousness through its cultural forms" (81). Carby's view corroborates Clifford's statement, cited above, that "interpreters constantly construct themselves through the others they study" (10). But self-construction is only part of anthropological research. In occasionally sharing with the reader the challenges of collecting authentic materials, Hurston, arguably, invited her readers into what Carby terms an "antagonistic relationship," one that included the honest plotting out of the research process, along a road at once smooth and bumpy.

Although perfect silence has surrounded Cabrera's lesbianism in scholarly studies, her sexual orientation informed her creativity, and in part her lifelong identity with Afro-Cuban minority culture. Still, her lesbian identity was a trump card that she never risked playing. Indeed, Cabrera's insider position among the educated Cuban white elite is part masquerade; even where she appears to be an initiate, she is quite frankly an outsider, and where as a white woman, she seems clearly positioned outside of the Black community, she apparently identifies with the marginalized experience and culture of the Cuban Black folk. As Michael Fischer states in "Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory," "the ethnographer, and the cross-cultural scholar in general often begin with a personal emphatic 'dual tracking,' seeking in the other clarification for processes in the self.... For many the search in another tradition ... can serve as a way of exploring one's own past" (199-200).

Native Ethnography

Recent work on the concept of what Kirin Narayan calls the "native ethnographer" has shown how slippery this terrain can be. Historically, a native anthropologist might be a representative native who had been perfunctorily trained in anthropological modes of data collection so that the society could be revealed "from within" (Narayan 672). Alternately, an especially intelligent native might receive a Western education and degree in anthropology, enabling him or her to "reveal a particular society to the profession with an insider's eye" (Narayan 672). Basalla suggests that Boas had the freedom to send Hurston anywhere he liked when she received the Carter C. Woodson grant after graduating from Barnard College. His choice to send her "home" to Eatonville might reflect "a larger philosophy about using 'native ethnographers' to obtain the best possible translations of a folktale" (149-50). But in fact, many so-called native anthropologists have "multiple planes of identification" (Narayan 676), each plane featuring a given context-specific facet of their identity.