Indiana State University

"Sis Cat" as Ethnographer: Self-Presentation and Self-Inscription in Zora Neale Hurston's

Mules and Men
Author(s): D. A. Boxwell
Source: African American Review, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Winter, 1992), pp. 605-617
Published by: Indiana State University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3041874 .
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"Sis Cat" as Ethnographer: Self-Presentation and
Self-Inscription in Zora Neale Hurston's Mules
and Men

O v ne of the most strikingphotographsever takenof an Afri-

can-American woman writer can be found in the Beinecke D. A. Boxwell is Assistant
Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. It depicts Zora Neale Professorof Englishat the Air
Hurston clad completely in white-dress, stockings, and shoes- ForceAcademyin Colorado
standing in front of the Chevrolet she used on her folklore-collect- Springs.
ing travels throughout the American South in the late 1920s. The
arresting thing about this photographic image is that her gar-
ments are neatly and contrastively accessorized by a gun belt, a
shoulder holster, and a ten-gallon hat. She is posing for the cam-
era eye, very much in her "performance mode," with her hands
on her hips, thumbs assertively on the belt, feet firmly planted on
the ground. Looking up to her right, she has a jaunty smile that
might best be described as cocksure (see Fig. 1 on p. 607).1
I begin with a description of this photograph because, in
"The Problem of the Text," Mikhail Bakhtin writes of the "author
image" in visual and literary works of art. This is what allows the
viewer or reader to feel the presence of the artist even though the
author is not a depicted, or visual, image, as she would be, say, in
a photograph. The "author image" is produced by the writer in
some sense entering the text "as part of the work" (109). The prob-
lem, as Bakhtin sees it, of the "forms in which [the author] is ex-
pressed in a work" (109) is of interest to the reader of the first of
Zora Neale Hurston's two book-length works of ethnography,
Mules and Men, first published in October 1935.2 The visible
image in the photograph I have just described seems consciously
replicated by Hurston the "author image"-maker and self-in-
scriber, and it is this problem which has hindered a sympathetic
understanding of Hurston's achievement as an ethnographer for
decades. Critics of ethnography have anxiously questioned how
far the author can go in depicting him/herself as an image in writ-
ing which, aspiring to scientific discourse, has traditionally at-
tempted to deny or suppress the existence of authorial images. I
would argue that Hurston had an understanding far ahead of her
time that writing social-scientific texts was not an impersonal,
value-free form of claiming authority. She felt, for reasons of both
race and gender, the constraints of complying with the modes of
orthodox anthropological writing. Moreover, she broke through
these constraints in ways that result, in Mules and Men, in a signifi-
cant achievement in American ethnology. Her ethnography
shows us that it is possible to overcome, as Hortense Spillers has
recently expressed it, the "pernicious distinctions" that separate

African American Review, Volume 26, Number 4

? 1992 D. A. Boxwell66 0
 "academy vs. vernacular," "the
scholar vs. the folk," and the "ivory
tower vs. the real world" (qtd. in
Baker and Redmond 71).
There is no question that
Hurston's deservedly high place in
American fiction and theater has be-
come increasingly uncontested in the
last two decades. Indeed, her work as
cultural critic, too, has received a kind
of canonization by her inclusion in the
recent anthology The Genderof Modern-
ism,a significant revisionary assertion
about the crucial role played by Euro-
pean, European-American, and Afri-
can-American women in the develop-
ment of High Modernism before 1930.
Yet, for all that, Hurston's work as a
professional folklorist and ethnologist
in a context beyond the purely cre-
ative or literary has hitherto received
only limited evaluation.3 In this arti-
cle, I would like to make a start at as-
sessing her place in American anthro-
pology and argue that it is more im-
portant than has often been recog-
nized. It is possible to see Hurston
shift the stable ground of traditional
anthropology by the ways in which
she presents the self in the act of par-
ticipating in, and subsequently record-
ing, the "folklore event." Mary Helen
Washington has pointed out that "one
of the main preoccupations of the
black woman writer is the black
woman herself" (qtd. in Baker and
Redmond 53), but this preoccupation
with self in forms of discourse outside
the realm of the creative arts has been
a problematic factor in any assess-
ment of the full scope of Hurston's
achievements.
Central to my evaluation of
Hurston's ethnographic work is the
role played in ethnography by the au-
thor and the ways in which the eth-
nographer inscribes herself into the
finished text. Here I would take issue
with Hurston's biographer, Robert
Hemenway, who states that the I nar-
rating Mules and Men is created so as
606 AFRICANAMERICAN
REVIEW
not "to intrude on the folklore event."
He contends that Hurston's narrator
is a 'curiously retiring figure," a "self-
effacing reporter created by Hurston
the folklorist to dramatize the process
of collecting and make the reader feel
part of the scene" (164). I believe
Hemenway, though essentially cor-
rect about the reportorial function of
this narrator, understates the forceful
presence and importance of the au-
thor image in Mules and Men. In this
regard he mirrors many of Hurston's
contemporary mainstream European-
American reviewers. Jonathan
Daniels' review of the book in the Oc-
tober 1935 SaturdayReviewof Literature
effectively erases both her presence
and her racial identity, however well-
meaning his comments:
No advantageof skinor bloodcould
have producedthe bookwhichMiss
Hurstonbroughtbackfromthe gay
"woofing'of Florida'slumbercamps
and the tawdry ritualsof the.little
sinisterstreetsin New OrleansVieux
Carre.Onlyanabilityto write-a rare
conjunctionof the sense of the ridic-
ulousandthesenseof thedramatic-
couldhaveproducedthisremarkable
collectionof Negrofolktalesandfolk
customs.(12)
Instead, I hope to show-in a
more positive way than her critics
have in the past-that Hurston's pres-
ence in the work as a created and as-
serted self is central and essential, uni-
fying the action it depicts and giving a
strong sense of cohesion to the
collection's disparate parts and multi-
tudinous story-telling voices. While it
is true that recent critics, not the least
of whom is Alice Walker, have
praised Mules and Men for its celebra-
tion of the African-American commu-
nitarian spirit,4 the work also cele-
brates the individual storyteller who
makes the expression of the group cul-
ture possible. The I of the work is self-
empowering in ways that are inelucta-
bly related to the desire for the expres-
sion of selfhood which marks much
African-American women's writing.5
What Barbara Christian has said of
Hurston's 1937 novel TheirEyes Were
Watching God seems equally pertinent
to Mules and Men, the first published
book-length work of anthropology by
a Black woman. Both Janie Crawford
of the novel and the I of Hurston the
real-world anthropologist "radically
envision the self as central" (Christian
175). Janie's empowering attainment
of self-revelation through narrative,
which provides both the occasion for,
and the structure of, the novel is a par-
adigm for the real-world ethnogra-
pher as well (Wall 661). It is this narra-
tive trajectory which has made
Hurston's anthropology the target of
yet another kind of critical misunder-
standing: outright invective from her
contemporary male critics, who ques-
tioned her objectivity, as well as her
scientific and academic qualifications.
Mules and Men is, at first glance, a
collection of seventy African-Ameri-
can folktales recorded by Hurston on
several extended "expeditions" to the
American South under the auspices of
the Department of Anthropology at
Columbia University and under the
conflict-ridden patronage of Mrs.
textual appurtenances of a scholarly Fig. 1. Photo-
work of social science.7 Yet, for all graph of Zora
Rufus Osgood Mason.6 The work, Neale
taHurtondSreslan
thstU is more tha the merely by CarlHurston
Van
written on her return to New York be-
obsering nd reortig preence Vechten.Yale
tween March 1930 and September
which orthodox ethnography de- Collection of
1932, and only eventually published
in 1935, is divided into two parts, manded of her. She is a central partici- American
"Folk Tales" and "Hoodoo." On its ini- pant in the story-telling contests of Literature,
rural Florida and the conjure rituals of Beinecke Rare
tial publication, the first part gave a Book and
general readership insights into the New Orleans. Manuscript
oral transmission of often highly sub- Hurston's presentation of herself Library,Yale
versive folk tales and songs. The sec- as an acting force (who assumes a va- University.
ond part details the occult rituals and riety of identities) -that is, one who Reprintedwith
folk medicine practices of the conjure does, not merely looks-seemed prob- the permission
lematic to readers expecting a stan- of CarlVsane
artists of New Orleans. It is a work of
anthropology, in its finished form, by dard work of ethnography. Her first Vechten.
virtue of its glossary, appendices, pref- critics believed the book was good
ace by another authoritative anthro- //entertainment" and could therefore
pologist (in this case Franz Boas, not merit consideration as a scientific
Hurston's mentor), and footnotes document. 8Arna Bontemps said of
which explain such exotic words as her writings that it was impossible to
chitterlingsand doodleysquat. In short, tell where the anthropology "~leftoff
it contains many of the conventional and where Zora began" (qtd. in

SELF-INSCRIPTION IN HURSTON'S MULES AND MEN 607

 Hemenway 166). More recently, Na-
than Huggins has asserted that "the
link between Hurston's mind and ma-
terial was never clear" (qtd. in
Hemenway 80). This suggests, in a pe-
jorative sense, that Mules and Men is
as much fiction as social science, if not
more so. Even a critic as sympathetic
as Robert Hemenway can't bring him-
self to acknowledge the work as an ex-
ample of anthropology in the tradi-
tionally accepted sense. For example,
the work ignores or invents chronol-
ogy and scientific methodology and is
lacking in other hallmarks of ethnog-
raphy like cross-cultural references
and citations of other related scholar-
ship (Hemenway 172). Indeed, there
is very little, if any, theoretical or ana-
lytical content, an approach to her
work which Hurston deliberately
agreed to take in order to make Mules
and Men a more commercially viable
property.9 Beyond the criticism of her
methodology and scientific approach,
Hurston also suffered the slings and
arrows of outraged social critics. Ster-
ling Brown, for example, damned
Mules and Men for lacking verisimili-
tude and a sense of social responsibil-
ity in its depiction of rural Florida as a
problem-free pastoral world evoked
by an egocentric narrator. If Hurston's
work were "more bitter," Brown com-
plained, "it would be nearer the total
truth" (qtd. in Hemenway 219).
But if Hurston has been attacked
for using the modes of fiction in her
reports "from the field," she may also
be said to have reinvented anthropol-
ogy in ways that seem increasingly ac-
ceptable to theorists and commenta-
tors of postmodern and postcolonial
anthropology. I am cognizant that this
argument is potentially fraught with
the risks articulated recently by Mi-
chael Awkward, who cautions against
seeing literature by African-Ameri-
cans in postmodernist terms. For this
approach, he convincingly argues, car-
ries with it the real possibility of "vir-
608 AFRICAN AMERICANREVIEW
tually erasing the blackness out of Af-
rican-American authorial utterance"
(qtd. in Baker and Redmond 76).
What I hope to demonstrate is that
Hurston's chief ethnographic text is a
significant expression of a central
tenet in her own artistic manifesto;
Mules and Men is ethnography which
also happens to prefigure later ques-
tions about institutionalized social sci-
ence. In "Characteristics of Negro Ex-
pression" (1934), Hurston declared
that, while the African-American
"lives and moves in the midst of a
white civilization, everything that he
[sic] touches is re-interpreted for his
[sic] own use" (181). This concept of
African-American originality also per-
tains to her own ethnography, a form
of expression which, like all cultural
forms, is the product of what Hurston
called "the exchange and re-exchange
of ideas between groups" (181). Put
succinctly, Mules and Men is her own
"re-interpretation" of ethnography.
e would do well, first, to ex-
amine the traditional under-
standing of what social science texts
should have aspired to at the time
Hurston was undergoing her aca-
demic training at Barnard and Colum-
bia in the 1920s. From a broad per-
spective, as Michel Foucault has
pointed out, all scientific writing has
traditionally and normatively strived
to suppress the sense that a work has
an author at all. In the Age of Enlight-
enment an emphasis on rationalism
and positivism dictated that scientific
discourses
began to be received for themselves,
in the anonymity of an established or
redemonstrabletruth;their member-
ship in a systematic ensemble, and
not the reference to the individual
who produced them, stood as their
guarantee.The author function faded
away .... (109)
This eventually became the predomi-
nant view of authorial "presence" in
the Departmnentof Anthropology at
Columbia University, as elsewhere.
Hurston, apparently affectionately, re-
ferred to Boas as "Papa Franz," which
is apt in so far as he had established a
patriarchal authority over early Amer-
ican anthropology which can hardly
be underestimated. Dell Hymes has
asserted, for instance, that Boas can be
said to have been the "organizer" of
the "great tradition" of modem an-
thropology as it moved from its base
in established museums of natural his-
tory into its "domestication" as an in-
stitutionalized academic discipline
(10). George W. Stocking, Jr., makes
an even greater claim for Boas's im-
portance:
Morethanany other man [he] defined
the "nationalcharacter"of anthropol-
ogy in the United States .... There is
no real question that he was the most
important single force in shaping
American anthropology in the first
half of the twentieth century. (1)
It was Boas above all who articulated
the essential underlying assumptions
about the discipline (Hymes 11). As
early as 1887 he asserted that truth in
anthropology could only be attained
by getting behind appearances, trans-
cending the point of view of the ob-
server, to arrive at categories that
were not founded "in the mind of the
student" but were somehow derived
from, consistent with, and, in a sense,
internal to the phenomena themselves
(Stocking 4). This insistence on de-em-
phasizing the anthropologist's free
play of the mind and personal re-
sponses to the observed subjects of
study was affirmed forty years later,
during the time Hurston was his stu-
dent. In his 1928 work Anthropology
and Modem Life, Boas reiterated that
the social sciences must be based
solely on the study of "observed phe-
nomena," and he went on to articulate
that
the scientific study of generalized so-
cial forms requires,therefore,thatthe
investigator free himself from all val-
uations based on [his] culture. An
objective,strictlyscientificinquirycan
be made only if wesucceedinentering
into each culture on its own basis.
(201)
Later claims were made by eth-
nographers for the objective, unintrus-
ive and depersonalized form of "au-
thor image," to use Bakhtin's concept.
Susan Sontag has pointed out that
Claude Levi-Strauss's insistence that
anthropology was a science, rather
than a humanistic study, had ramifica-
tions for the presentation of the self in
his works. "Structural anthropology,"
she wrote in 1963, "aims towards this,
by obliterating all traces of the
anthropologist's personal experience
... through rigorous formalism" (77).
According to these standards,
Mules and Men, with its highly visible,
intensely subjective, and active narra-
tor and distinctly felt "author image,"
appears to be a willful violation of
long-held and persistent attitudes to
social-scientific writing. Yet it is now
possible, I think, to view Hurston's
work as a striking prefiguration of the-
ories articulated in Clifford Geertz's
recent writings about the limitations
of Boasian attitudes toward ethnogra-
phy. (This even goes beyond what
Hemenway astutely points out as
Hurston's rejection of the insistent ra-
tionality of the dominant European-
American culture [213]). Geertz recog-
nizes that anthropological texts can-
not, and should not, aspire to ideals of
scientific objectivity and author-evacu-
ated field reporting governed by rigor-
ous methodological attitudes. By mak-
ing this claim, Geertz has significantly
contributed to the debate over the na-
ture of anthropology and its texts. He
has argued for the essential fictional-
ity of ethnography and has shown
how anthropological texts are recep-
tive to literary, as much as scientific,
analysis. Geertz contends that these
texts are fictions, in the nonpejorative
sense that they are "something made,
something fashioned-the original
SELF-INSCRIPTION IN HURSTON'S MULESANDMEN 609
 meaning of fiction-not that they are
false, unfactual or merely 'as if'
thought experiments" (Local15). That
is to say, anthropology requires the
kinds of imaginative acts necessary to
create fictional literature; both require
a "making." From a rhetorical stand-
point, Geertz also emphasizes that eth-
nographic texts do not persuade
through the marshaling of facts and
details, as has been traditionally ac-
cepted, nor do they persuade through
their theoretical arguments (Works3-
4). Like a novel or a poem, ethnogra-
phy depends for its truth value on the
capacitytoconvinceus thatwhat[eth-
nographers]say is a resultof their
havingactuallypenetrated(orif you
prefer,been penetratedby) another
form of life, of having,one way or
another,truly "beenthere."(Works
4-5)
Perhaps the strongest statement of
this postmodertn recognition of the es-
sentially fictive nature of the social sci-
ences is Roy Wagner's TheInvention of
Culture.This work's thesis is that
every culture, including the
anthropologist's own, is "invented."
"An anthropologist 'invents' the cul-
ture he believes himself to be study-
ing" (qtd. in Brown 16). More than
this, authorial presence in ethnogra-
phy is, as Geertz has argued, inescap-
able. The author's presence tends "to
be relegated, like other embarrass-
ments, to prefaces, notes or appendi-
ces" (Works16). "But in one way or an-
other, however unreflexively and
with whatever misgivings about the
propriety of it, ethnographers all man-
age" to get themselves into their texts.
'There are," Geertz contends, "some
very dull books in anthropology, but
few if any anonymous murmurs"
(Works17).
Hurston's unabashed self-inscrip-
tion in Mules and Men demonstrates
that she, perhaps alone of her contem-
poraries, seems to have recognized, at
some level, the illusory nature of "the
effort to create a formal vocabulary of
610 AFRICANAMERICAN
REVIEW
analysis purged of all subjective refer-
ence," as Geertz sums up a founda-
tional assumption of mainstream so-
cial science (Local34). The mutually
interdependent sources of inspiration
for her fiction and her ethnography'0
are related to another point Geertz
makes. The objective status of anthro-
pological knowledge is not necessar-
ily "social reality but scholarly arti-
fice" (16). Now Hurston was a prod-
uct of her training under Boas: She
praised her mentor's "genius for pure
objectivity" in her autobiography
(182), and she expressed anxious con-
cern in her letters to him that Mules
and Men was not so scientific as he
would have liked. Yet she also knew
the difficulties inherent in writing "sci-
entific texts from biographical experi-
ences," which is the fundamental di-
lemma of the ethnographer's discipl-
ine, as Geertz has pointed out (Works
14). He speaks of the ethnographer as
an Olympian scientist who is also pos-
sessed of the "sovereign conscious-
ness of the hyperauthorial novelist.
Small wonder then that most ethnog-
raphers tend to oscillate uncertainly
between the two, sometimes in differ-
ent books, more often in the same
one" (Works10). Hurston expressed
an awareness of this dilemma in
Boas's presence but she nevertheless
resolved it by unashamedly inscribing
herself into the text of Mules and Men
in ways that valorized both her per-
sonal identity as an African-American
woman and her professional identity
as a serious and purposeful ethnogra--
pher. By refiguring ethnographic dis-
course in her own, and her own
culture's, image, she is nothing if not
certain about her place in the work.
The extent to which she participates
in the action she describes is not
unique to the ethnological writing of
her time, but the presentation of her-
self as a strong ordering force in the
text is. The objects of her study are,
thus, often minimized; instead the
subjective presence of the ethnogra-
pher is privileged in many different
ways.
For example, she is actively
sought out by her informants, the sto-
rytellers, instead of the reverse, which
is the norm in anthropological field
study. A character in her home town
of Eatonville, Florida, remarks that
Hurston looks as if she's bored by
what she is hearing, and he urges the
rest of the group to tell better stories,
or "lies" as they are called, in order to
hold her interest: "Zora's gittin' rest-
less. She think she ain't gointer hear
no more" (43). At the opening of the
second chapter, Eatonville storytellers
such as George Thomas and Charlie
Jones appeal to her to come and listen:
"Zora,"GeorgeThomasinformedme,
"you come to de right place if lies is
what you want. Ah'm gointer lie up
a nation." Charlie Jones said, "Yeah
man Me an my sworn buddy Gene
Brazzleis here. Big Moose done come
down from de mountaini' "Now, you
gointer hear lies above suspicion,"
Gene added. (37)
It is almost as if her presence is re-
quired for this rich oral culture to
come into being. In the introduction
to the work she writes, "Here in
Eatonville I knew everybody was
going to help me" collect the folktales
which form the basis of her study (19).
A standard trope of ethnography,
as Carl G. Herndl recently pointed
out, is " 'the arrival story,' the poetic
description of the ethnographer enter-
ing the native scene. This trope estab-
lishes the fieldworker's presence, au-
thorizes her account, and then allows
her to recede from" the description
that follows, subsequently suppress-
ing "the writer's genuine participa-
tion throughout the remainder of the
text in order to establish the 'scien-
tific' authority of the 'observation'"
(325). Hurston revels in her own "ar-
rival stories," without, however, sub-
sequently fading into the background.
At the very opening of Mules and Men,
the townspeople introduce and name
her to the reader, thereby making
"Zora Hurston" the subject of the
work. As she rolls into Eatonville in
her Chevrolet, "They looked up from
the game and for a moment it looked
as if they had forgotten me. Then B.
Moseley said, 'Well if it ain't Zora
Hurston!' Then everybody crowded
around the car to help greet me" (23).
They eagerly ask her how long she
plans to stay among them and with
whom she plans to stay. She allows
her informants to comment on her po-
tentially disruptive presence in Eaton-
ville: ' 'No, Zora ain't goin' nowhere
wid my husband,' Clara announced.
'If he got anything to tell her-it's
gointer be right here in front of me'
(55). And the great disparity between
her initial identity as an "insider"
who is named to the reader by her
own townspeople and her later one as
a threatening "outsider" who, after
leaving the security of Eatonville,
must work to establish her legitimacy
as an "insider" in Polk County is the
focus of much of her commentary.
This is especially vivid in the descrip-
tions of her incongruously urban ap-
pearance when she first arrives in the
lumber camps to gather folklore (89-
90). Her "arrival story" in Loughman,
Polk County, is fancifully delivered as
she and her "little Chevrolet" together
form a "we" who "debate" where to
go (85) and may have made the
wrong decision:
That night the place was full of
men-come to look over the new
addition to the quarters. Very little
was said directly to me and when I
tried to be friendly there was a no-
ticeable disposition to fend me off.
This worried me because I saw at
once that this group of several hun-
dred Negroes from all over the
South was rich field for folk-lore,
but here I was figuratively starving
to death in the midst of plenty. (85-
86)
SELF-INSCRIPTION IN HURSTON'S MULES AND MEN 611
 This is one of many references in is not that they take her for a lofty
the text to the occupational hazards of scholar but for, she says, "a revenue
ethnology, as she inscribes herself as a officer or detective of some kind" (86).
focal point of community conflict in How she becomes an "insider" is the
the Loughman, Polk County, lumber focus of much of Mules and Men, and
camps and "jooks." the text thereby enters the realm of
Yet even before others have intro- metaethnography. That is to say,
duced the ethnographer to us, or had Hurston writes ethnography about
theopportunitytobegintell- the problematic aspects of
ing their stories, she lets the writing ethnography, but
reader know of the folktales Hurston's not in the accepted scien-
she had heard as "Lucy ethnography tific way of carefully detail-
Hurston's daughter, Zora" is significant ing how results were ob-
(17). In fact, in the introduc- tained in a field study from
tion to Mules and Men, it is because it a methodological stand-
she who tells the very first portrays a point. Instead, the focus is
story in the collection. Suit- very much-in an overtly
ably enough, it is a comical highly actual- personal way-on her ini-
creation myth-one about ized culture tial exclusion from her sub-
God's creation of the human creating and jects; her subsequent friend-
soul (19). Though she does ship with Big Sweet, a fig-
surrender the folktelling passing on ure of female power in the
functioninthefollow-onnar- richly community of storytellers
rative entitled "Folk Tales," which gradually accepts
allowinghersubjects' voices
distinctive the ethnologist; and her
to come to the forefront, it is narrative eventual success as a field
she who steps in from time and ritual researcher: Having "made a
to time to tell us the very fine and full collection
townspeople's reactions to traditions. on the Saw-Mill Camp," she
each story, much as the poet feels "no regrets at shoving
does in TheCanterburyTales off" from T.ouihman. Flor-
to remind the reader of his presence in ida (197).
the narrative superstructure connect- In the "Hoodoo" section,
ing the tales. To cite just one example, Hurston seems to be very con-
after Eugene Oliver and Black Baby sciously inscribing herself as some
have outdone each other telling exag- type of occult figure, further estab-
gerated anecdotes describing the big- lishing herself as the focal point of
gest insects they've seen, Hurston subjectively experienced folkloric
states, "Everybody liked to hear about culture. Instead of providing objec-
the mosquito. They laughed all over tive, distanced reportage of voodoo
themselves" (135). and conjure rituals in New Orleans,
How the folk react to Hurston as she focuses her writing on her reac-
she assumes and plays out various tion to the events she is participating
roles is of equal importance, how- in. It is, quite literally, sensational
ever. This is particularly noticeable anthropology. She avers, "I had five
in the scenes set in the Polk County, psychic experiences" in one sixty-
Florida, lumber camps where she is nine-hour initiation rite "and awoke
forced to disguise herself as a boot- at last with no feeling of hunger, only
legger "on the lam" in order to ob- one of exultation" (247). Her naked
tain the confidence of her initially body itself becomes a kind of runic
suspicious informants. The problem ethnographic text in this same rite

612 AFRICANAMERICAN
REVIEW
(illustrated in a highly stylized Art
Deco depiction by the book's illustr-
ator, Miguel Covarrubias, of contem-
porary Vanity Fair fame). She is re-
named "The Rain-Bringer" by a con-
jure artist, Luke Turner, a supposed
nephew of Marie Leveau, who paints
a yellow lightning symbol down her
back "from my right shoulder to my
left hip. This was to be my sign for-
ever. The Great One was to speak to
me in storms" (249). Her face is also
decorated with a symbolic sun and a
pair of iconographic eyes as part of
the ceremony, as a result of which she
is worthy to be "taken by the Spirit."
Hurston's critics have noted that
all this emphasis on the self placing it-
self in sensationalized roles strains the
credulity of readers expecting rigor-
ous social science. But they miss the
point that Geertz makes in his essay ti-
tled "Blurred Genres: The Refigura-
tion of Social Thought." The acknowl-
edgment that no discourse is generi-
cally pure has meant "a challenge is
being mounted to some of the central
assumptions of mainstream social sci-
ence. The strict separation of theory
and data, the 'brute fact' idea, the ef-
fort to create ... analysis purged of all
subjective reference" in anthropology
texts was always illusory (Local34).
The value of Hurston's work is that it
helps us recognize this. The
metaphorizing tendencies of more re-
cent ethnography, as if anthropolo-
gists were as much steeped in poetry
and drama as social science, as Geertz
has noted in Worksand Lives, are pres-
ent in Mules and Men to a degree that
would not unduly disturb such social
scientists as Victor Turner and Alton
Becker. They have refigured social
thought along such models as "life-as-
theatre" and "life-as-game" respec-
tively (Local23).
Hurston's ludic tendency to
metaphorize the ethnographer's iden-
tity reaches its final apotheosis in
Mules and Men when the author her-
self, functioning as the final story-tell-
ing voice in the collection, concludes
the book, just as she began, with a
folk myth. This story also has rele-
vance to Hurston's identity as a cre-
ative artist and ethnographer. The
tale, which functions as an epilogue,
recounts the reason for cats' washing
themselves after they eat, rather than
before. After being hoodwinked by
the rat (here functioning as a male
trickster figure) as she was about to
eat him, Sis Cat learns from experi-
ence that she must eat the rat while
she has him in her clutches and worry
later about the polite niceties of wash-
ing herself. The story ends this way:
So de cat caught herself a rat
again and set down to eat. So de Rat
said, "Where's yo' manners at, Sis
Cat? You going to eat 'thout wash-
ing yo' face and hands?"
"Oh, Ah got plenty manners," de
cat told 'im. "But Ah eats mah din-
ner and washes mah face and uses
mah manners afterwards."So she et
right on 'im and washed her face
and hands. And cat's been washin'
after eatin' ever since. (304)
I think it's significant that this final
story should be about female empow-
erment through experience, wit, and
independent and unconventional
thought and behavior. Moreover,
Hurston appropriates the story for her
own final act of self-inscription, as-
suming Sis Cat's identity in the final
paragraph of her ethnography and ex-
pressing it in the vernacular: "I'm sit-
ting here like Sis Cat, washing my
face and usin' my manners" (304).
Adopting this feline persona, Hurston
has, in essence, compared herself to a
folktale character, one eminently wor-
thy of emulation. Hence, Mules and
Men ends on a creatively affirmative
act of self-mythification.
H urston'scontributionto the
process of "blurring genres" in
Mules and Men is, I hope I have shown,
of the greatest significance. Yet, in the
SELF-INSCRIPTION
INHURSTON'S
MULESANDMEN 613
 final analysis, it is not so surprising.
She did so for expressive and personal
reasons, but also as a way of subvert-
ing pernicious racist assumptions by
social scientists and their "fictions"
about her people. Many recent femi-
nist critics have noted the tendency in
African-American women's writing to
elude definitional or generic specific-
ity, much as Hurston herself does in
the photograph reproduced on p. 607.
BarbaraJohnson has expressed this
idea well when writing apropos of
TheirEyes WereWatching God:
The inside/outside boundariesbe-
tween characterand narrator,be-
tween standardand individual,are
both transgressedand preserved,
makingit impossibleto identifyand
totalizeeitherthesubjectorthenature
of the discourse(218).
Astute critics have commented on
this aspect of Hurston's fiction. I think
it is possible to see the same transgres-
sions enriching Mules and Men, as
well. Her final assumption of a feline
identity, Sis Cat, is the culmination of
an empowering self-transformation
throughout the course of the work
which takes on a palpably magic-like
character. With this power, Hurston
has assumed the authority to speak,
as an ethnographer, for her people in
a way that can, in turn, empower her
subjects. Majorie Pryse has stated
that Hurston was a key figure in the
assertion of a self-conscious and pow-
erful "voice" in African-American cul-
ture and women's writing:
By writingdown blackfolklorein a
formthat made it accessiblefor the
firsttimetogeneralreaders[she]called
anabrupthaltto theculturalattitude
thatexcludedblackwomenfromlit-
eraturebecauseitexcludedthemfrom
otherkindsof power.MulesandMen
used the power of the writtentext
itselfas formof magic.(11)
Pryse goes on to echo Alice Walker's
establishment of Hurston as a 'found-
ing mother" of an African-American
women's literary tradition, as vital to
614 AFRICANAMERICAN
REVIEW
her culture and race as the Bible was
to the white male colonists of seven-
teenth-century New England.
Hurston's ethnographic work gave
her the power to "tell stories because
in the act of writing down the old
'lies,' Hurston created a bridge be-
tween the 'primitive' authority of folk
life and the literary power of written
texts" (11). In Mules and Men Hurston
invested herself with what Pryse calls
the "magic of authority" (12) that
makes storytelling possible. To tell a
different story from that told by her
contemporary social scientists-this
was the imperative of Hurston's eth-
nographic work.
While Hurston "blurred genres"
to celebrate and valorize both her
own identity and that of her culture,
other social scientists, using strenu-
ously "scientific" writing, usually der-
ogated African-American culture as
pathological, if they acknowledged
the existence of an autonomous cul-
ture at all. Let me cite just one of
many egregious examples to show the
degree to which Hurston's brand of
ethnography stood in oppositional re-
lation to what was supposedly ratio-
nal, objective Establishment Social Sci-
ence in the 1930s. The preeminent soci-
ologist E. Franklin Frazier, as John F.
Szwed has stated, used racist statisti-
cal surveys in his field research which
lacked "any ethnographically-based
insight into black life," while his work
described African-American commu-
nities as "disorganized and culturally
non-adaptive" (Szwed 159). In a study
entitled "Traditions and Patterns of
Negro Family Life in the United
States," published the year before
Mules and Men, Frazier concluded:
Tobe sure,whenone undertakesthe
study of the Negro he discoversa
greatpovertyof traditionsand pat-
terns of behaviorthat exerciseany
realinfluenceon theformationof the
Negro'spersonalityand conduct.If
. . . the moststrikingthingaboutthe
Chineseis theirdeepculture, themost
conspicuousthing aboutthe Negro
 is his lack of a culture. (qtd. inSzwed
159)
As Szwed points out, the estab-
lished consensus of American social
scientists between the wars, and well
into the 1960s,11 was that African-
Americans were part of "a deficit cul-
ture, a kind of negative culture exist-
ing in the absence of a real one" (160).
Positioning itself in the interstices of
this Establishment edifice, Hurston's
Mules and Men was the first full-
length work to give the lie to "scien-
tific" consensus, arguing for the per-
sistence and continuity of a distinctive
African-American culture and tradi-
tion. She did this even before such rel-
atively enlightened social scientists as
fellow Boas student Melville
Herskovits (TheMythof theNegroPast,
1941) and linguist Lorenzo D. Turner
in theGullahDialect,
(Africanisms
1949). Hurston's ethnography is signif-
icant because it portrays a highly actu-
alized culture creating and passing on
richly distinctive narrative and ritual
traditions.
Sis Cat successfully broke free of
her mentor's dictates that the ethnog-
rapher distance herself from her sub-
jects. 'The emancipation from our
own culture, demanded of the anthro-
pologist, is not easily attained," Boas
wrote in 1928, the year after Hurston's
first return to her Eatonville home as
a field researcher, 'because we are
only too apt to consider the behavior
in which we are bred as natural for all
mankind, as one that must necessarily
develop everywhere" (202). Hurston
surely sensed that an African-Ameri-
can woman valorizing herself and her
people had nothing to gain, and every-
thing to lose, by emancipating herself
from her own culture via Boas's ideal-
ized tenets of "rigid, objective
study" (204). Thus Hurston was
the first to close the gap between
the subject of ethnography and its au-
dience, which Geertz has posited as a
necessary concomitant of
postcolonial anthropology. The be-
lief that ethnographic 'subjects
were to be described but not ad-
dressed, or the audience informed
but not implicated" (Works132) is a
normative value of traditional anthro-
pology which Hurston did not, and
could not, embody. From a purely rhe-
torical standpoint, Mules and Men is a
fully persuasive work of ethnogra-
phy. As Mary Helen Washington has
movingly attested of its fundamental
truth value,
The tales are set in the framework of
a story in which Hurston herself is a
character.The other characters,who
in conventional folklore collections
are merely informants, are real per-
sonalities inMules andMen,exposing
their prejudices, love affairs,jealous-
ies .... She saw black lives as psy-
chologically integral-not half-lives,
stunted by the effects of racism and
poverty. (Washington, Introduction
14)
On a personal level, too,
Hurston's self-transformative poses-
from "Zora Hurston" of Eatonville to
'The Rain-Bringer" of New Orleans
to her final assertions of professional
accomplishment and personal power
as Sis Cat-trace, in Cheryl A. Wall's
apt words, "the journey of the artist
who travels both to the matrix of the
culture and to the deepest regions of her
self. Having completed this dual jour-
ney, she is empowered to tell her
story to the world" (676). Signifi-
cantly, Zora Neale Hurston's transmu-
tation of social science in Mules and
Men embodies Stephen A. Tyler's
marvelously apt description of eth-
nography: "an occult document...
an enigmatic, paradoxical, and eso-
teric conjunction of reality and fan-
tasy" (qtd. in Geertz, Works137).
SELF-INSCRIPTION IN HURSTON'S MULES AND MEN 615
 Notes I Hurston'sflamboyantlyself-dramatizingtheatricalityin social settings is nicely detailed by Hemenway
22ff.
2Both Mules and Men and the 1938 account of her research in Jamaica and Haiti,TellMy Horse, have
recently been described by HenryLouis Gates, Jr., as "herclassic anthropologicalworks' (207).
3Hemenway has given us the most sustained criticalevaluation of her approach to folkloreresearch and
writing,viewing it throughthe prismof her entire creative career. However, there has been littleeffortto
place Hurstonin the largersocial-scientificcontext out of which her academic trainingas an anthropologist
emerged. Hurston'sown expression of her place in American anthropologyin her autobiographyDust
Trackson a Road is characteristically"mock-humblen yet ultimatelyunrevealing (like so much in this work).
Aftershe lists her association with the AmericanFolkloreSociety, the American EthnologicalSociety, and
the AmericanAnthropologicalSociety, she remarks:"So to me these honors meant something .... Itwas
a long stop for the waif of EatonvillenI have been invitedto join these professional organizations (179-80).
4Walkerwrites, in her forewordto Hemenway, that Mules and Men is full of stories of "an inventive,joy-
ous, courageous and outrageous people: loving drama, appreciatingwit and, most of all, relishingthe plea-
sure of each other's loquacious and bodacious company (xii).
5See, for example, Washington'sInverted Lives, Smith, and Carby.
6For furtherdetails on the difficultiesof this relationship,see Hemenway, ch. 5 Godmother and Big
Sweet." Carbyalso mentions the highly problematicnature of patronage in the HarlemRenaissance (165-
66).
7The forewordby "FranzBoas, Ph.D., LL.D.0(as the title page of the 1935 edition valorizes his profes-
sional qualificabons)is interestingbecause he praises Hurston'swork as valuable to students of "cultural
history,' ratherthan puttinghis imprimatur,in directterms, on Mules and Men as a scientific workof social
anthropology(8). MaryV. Dearbornobservantly remarksthat, traditionally,ethnic women's writinghas usu-
ally been "mediatedoby devices such as prefaces, appendices, glossaries, and annotations which "serve to
'translate'the foreignness of the ethnic experience for the dominantculture, to guarantee the author's
ethnicity,and often, in the last analysis, to make the text more accessible to the reader' (36). Dearborn
avers that this authenticatingmediationis performed,more often than not, by a "non-ethnicoman. This is
certainlythe dynamic at workin Mules and Men, which on closer inspection seems rendered less, rather
than more, "scientificoby the superimpositionof such textualappurtenances.
8Manyof the favorable criticalnotices which her work received stressed Hurston's"entertainmentvalue.
For example, Lewis Gannett wrote, "Ican't remember anything better since 'Uncle Remus' 0 (12).
9See, for example, Hurston'sletter to Boas (20 Aug 1934) qtd. in Hemenway 163-64.
100ne of the many trulymarvelous examples of the folkloricinfluence at work in her fiction is the call-and-
response of the "impatientbuzzardsoafter the mock funeralfor MattBonner's mule in TheirEyes Were
WatchingGod, ch. 6.
"Social-scientific orthodoxyeven in the CivilRights era derogated African-Americanculture. For in-
stance, Glazer and Moynihan'simmensely influentialBeyond the MeltingPot (1963) asserted the view that
"the Negro has no values and cultureto guard and protects(qtd. in Szwed 160).

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