| Zora Neale Hurston studied with Franz Boas from 1925 to the mid-1930s. Despite his
urging she did not complete her dissertation. However, she had completed a number of
ethnographic and folkloric works which clearly reveal his influence. Under Boas’s
watchful influence, Hurston began to make changes in both anthropology and literature,
anticipating and influencing future developments. Boas was generally reluctant to write
prefaces for books. However, he did so for Hurston’s Mules and Men, displaying his
encouragement and approval of her work. Under his influence she helped bring a more
subjective and novelistic style to ethnographic work and a more ethnographic tone to
literature. Her work has influenced a number of anthropologists, directly and indirectly,
including Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, and George Marcus, as well as literary figures
such as Alice Walker, Tony Morrison and Maya Angelou. She anticipated a more
reflexive and subjective anthropology in which the narrator was no longer privileged and
the subject allowed to speak for her or himself. |