Saturday, February 06, 2021

Folktales for Black History month

John McWhorter had an essay last summer on Zora Neal Hurston and her place in Black history on City Journal.

 Most people have heard of Zora Neal Hurston because of the movie made from her novel Their Eyes were Watching God.



but I was more familiar with her as an anthropologist who related the stories of her town and the folk tales of Southern Blacks, collected during the depression.

.....


Known mostly as a novelist, Hurston also had a career as an anthropologist. She studied under the well-known Franz Boas,...
Under Boas’ guidance, Hurston was part of a school of anthropological thought that was “concerned with debunking scientific racism that many anthropologists had been involved in constructing in late-19th century and in the early years of the 20th century,” explains Deborah Thomas, a professor at University of Pennsylvania and one of the keynote speakers at a 2016 conference on Hurston’s work.
“What made anthropology attractive to her was that it was a science through which she could investigate the norms of her own community and put them in relation to broader norms.”


 

Italics mine.

one of my objections to the "racial theory" etc. nonsense is that it is marxism: i.e. it posits a "them vs us" mindset that separates people.

But as one who has lived and worked with people in several cultures (mostly non European, but also ethnic American), anthropology lets one see the differences in the context of what people have in common with each other: i.e. family life, community, personal relationships.

Folk tales help to explain how people see the world so help one understand this in a non threatening way.

One barrier to cross cultural understanding is that people in different cultures actually see the world differently and think differently, but by putting these things into stories it helps others to understand these differences not as alien but as similar, sort of like the tale of the blind men and the elephant).

an example of her collection of folk tales can be read on line here:


some of her books can be found on Project Gutenburg.

Librivox has a list of older stories and essays (out of copyright) about the black experience LINK including one by Ms Hurston: Lawing and jawing.


Internet archives has a lot of her books for borrowing, and it also has an audio collection from when she collected stories and interviews while working under the WPA during the depression.

including this interview with the last slave deported to America.




....

This story was finally published in recent years, because stories of the Black experience were not popular at the time it was recorded, let alone stories of slavery, but  to make things "worse" she was criticized because she wrote in dialect rather than proper English... 


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