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Decolonizing Ethnography

In: Women at Sea

Author

Listed:
  • Kevin Meehan

Abstract

At the height of the Great Depression, in 1936 and 1937, African American novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Jamaica and Haiti on consecutive Guggenheim grants in order to study Caribbean folk religion.1 It was during this period that Hurston produced her best known piece of writing, the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.2 After her time in Haiti was cut short by a mysterious stomach ailment—caused, perhaps, by a bocor or Vodou priest who was guarding his turf against the anthropologist’s prying gaze—Hurston returned to the United States, where she completed Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, a nonfiction text based on her Caribbean fieldwork.3 Successive generations of African American anthropologists have faithfully preserved her legacy as an anthropologist and a Caribbeanist, but outside this I community of scholars the primary transcript of Hurston’s Caribbean sojourn has languished in relative obscurity since its publication in 1938.4 With the recent re-issue of Tell My Horse—in two separate editions offered by Harper Collins and the Library of America—and given signs that under the influence of feminist and colonial discourse theory a new wave of interpretive scholarship on this text may be emerging, the time for reconsidering and reclaiming Hurston’s neglected Caribbean narrative has certainly arrived.5

Suggested Citation

  • Kevin Meehan, 2001. "Decolonizing Ethnography," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert & Ivette Romero-Cesareo (ed.), Women at Sea, chapter 0, pages 245-279, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-08515-3_11
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-08515-3_11
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