The principal subjectivity of this research is Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse:
Voodoo in Jamaica and Haiti, originally published in 1938 by J. B. Lippincott, Inc.
Hurston's career as a Cultural Anthropologist is privileged in this paper, although her
substantial canon and acclaim as a literary ancestor to Africana women writers in American
Literature are also acknowledged. Categorization of Tell My Horse...as fiction, and
reasons why Tell My Horse… has been caricaturized as "fictive" are examined from a
womanist perspective.
The significance is that Tell My Horse represents in depth fieldwork in Caribbean
ethnography, which materially added to the canon of cultural anthropology in general,
and spawned a stream of continuous scholarship in Voudou practiced in the diaspora ever since. My research objectives include
·Dispelling the fictional classification of Tell My Horse
·Situating this text within the classification of Ethnography
·Re-introducing Zora Neale Hurston to her audiences as an academy
educated Cultural Anthropologist |