Fiction as Ethnography:

Impact of Zora Neale Hurston’s Academic Training on Her Creative Work

Abstract

This paper explores how Zora Neale Hurston’s training as an
ethnographer impacted her creative work as a fiction writer. It achieves
its stated objective by first theorizing upon the topic by juxtaposing
Hurston’s ethnographic career and research work with those of two
women ethnographers, Cuba’s Lydia Cabrera and Poland’s Anzia
Yezierska, to illustrate how Hurston utilized her academic training and
inside knowledge of her community to develop special methodologies
uniquely designed to address her specific challenges in conducting
ethnographic research on Black American minority culture. Next,
the paper theorizes Hurston’s use of various ethnographic details,
such as religious imagery derived from local spiritual and cultural
practices, as well as feminist Biblical revisionism. Two short stories by
Hurston, “Sweat” and “The Gilded Six-Bits,” are thoroughly analyzed
for their aspects of material culture (specifically religious symbolism
and money), representation of women’s economic empowerment, and
depiction of marriage. The paper concludes that Hurston’s earliest
work was more likely to have benefited from her recollections and
experiences of her native Black American culture as compared to her
later work, which included richer ethnographic details.