Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora Neale Hurston, who hailed from the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, is probably best known for her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. But what many readers don’t know is that Hurston was first and foremost an anthropologist and folklorist. After she left Florida, she studied at Barnard College with the great anthropologist Franz Boas. He helped her understand that her subject matter, her field of study, should be her own people – the working African Americans of Florida. Hurston immersed herself in her fieldwork, traveling to and spending lots of time in the turpentine camps of Florida. She was very much a participant-observer anthropologist, an approach some say she took to an extreme when she went into training as a voodoo priestess in New Orleans and Haiti so that she could fully document this secretive subculture. If you’re curious about her anthropological experiences in Florida and New Orleans, her 1935 bo