Mules and Men

Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston's 1935 ethnography from J. B. Lippincott, is cited here for its fieldwork among African American communities in Florida and Louisiana and for how that fieldwork is framed. Its strength is that Hurston was an initiate into hoodoo practice as well as a trained anthropologist, a dual standing that distinguishes her record from other contemporaneous ethnographers such as Harry Middleton Hyatt and is itself a point of ongoing scholarly discussion. Its limit is that her literary, first person narrative style departs from the detached conventions of academic ethnography of her time, which is part of what later scholars still debate about how to read the book as evidence.