According to Hurston, the desired death of the man occurred, as expected, during the ritual process. With another hoodoo doctor, Hurston gathered a beef brain, beef tongue, a beef heart, a black cat, and a live black chicken in addition to a small doll that resembled a man that someone hoped would die. The ashes were supposed to be a barrier to stop the brother from returning. She gathered the chickens, helped kill them, and spread the ashes on a highway to help a woman who wished to get rid of her husband’s brother. Again with the guidance of Luke Turner, Hurston participated in confessions, similar to those of Catholicism but required her participation in the sacrificing of chickens. Above is one of the many unique experiences she put herself through to understand other cultures. As seen in the excerpt above, Hurston not only studied and researched hoodoo as a spiritual practice but deeply immersed herself in the culture as a whole, experiencing it as any other hoodoo participant would. This intense description is one of her experiences with a local hoodoo doctor Luke Turner. In great detail, she described being “stretched, face downwards the snakeskin cover, and began three day search for the spirit could have no food, but a pitcher of water”. In an excerpt, she describes her experience of going without food or water for sixty-nine hours straight as part of a hoodoo ritual. In 1935, Hurston wrote Mules and Men which was a collection of African American culture and folklore she had experienced during her trips to North Florida. Hurston wrote to Alain Locke, an advisor and former professor at Howard University, that “for the sake of thoroughness, using the vacuum method grabbing everything see.” Hurston said she was meeting with every single hoodoo doctor she ever heard of, leaving no stone unturned or ritual unexperienced. Here she dove deep into the study of hoodoo by fully immersing herself through experience. In order to study hoodoo, she returned to her hometown of Eaton, Florida. Hoodoo, a set of spiritual practices, traditions, and beliefs created by enslaved Africans and hidden from slave owners, originated in the American south and later spread across the United States during the Great Migration (which was also a significant cause of the Harlem Renaissance). Hurston dedicated many of her early years of anthropology to the study of hoodoo. Source: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain) Boas took a special effort to encourage his students to deeply immerse themselves into the cultures and communities in which they chose to study. She greatly furthered these interests at Columbia University, where she worked with the man sometimes referred to as the father of American anthropology, Franz Boas. Although Hurston is most well known for her contributions to the Harlem Renaissance and writings such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, she also contributed significantly through her anthropological and ethnographic research, such as the film mentioned above.ĭuring her time at Howard University, Hurston first found an interest in anthropology by observing how different the students there were in comparison to the people in her hometown, whom she had been surrounded by practically her entire life. Here, she met other writers such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, whom she would go on with to contribute to the Harlem Renaissance, a period defined by the explosion of African American culture in Harlem, New York. She then received a scholarship to stu dy at Barnard College at Colombia University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology. Here, she was a very active student, joining the student government and co-founding The Hilltop, a popular newspaper at Howard. Soon after, she and her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, where she resided until attending Howard University. Zora Neale Hurston was born January 15th, 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama to parents that had both been previously enslaved. This short film, produced in 1928 and titled Children’s Game, was filmed by Zora Neale Hurston, a very famous and influential African American anthropologist and writer. We watch as he shows off his impressive and energetic moves such as cartwheels and the splits. Suddenly, the children stop skipping and begin clapping at the same moment that the boy in the center breaks out in dance. In the middle of this circle is a young African American boy in a loose white shirt and black pants. An old, grainy video depicts a group of African American schoolchildren holding hands as they skip in a circle.
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