And one need not be a formal believer to make claims about God or gods. However, Hurston’s ethnographies, while they do not fit the genre requirements of the academic anthropology of her time, presage the literary moves, misrecognized as innovations, announced and called for by James Clifford – and the mostly white and male authors in Writing Culture – by fifty years. In her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road,she writes, “It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. She left graduate school in anthropology after one semester of rarely attending classes, and she made clear that she did not believe in God, at least as presented to her by others. It might seem odd at first that Zora Neale Hurston serves as an exemplar of what I would call anthropological theology. Perhaps rather than beginning with anthropologists in one corner and theologians in the other and asking why and how they can talk across the room to each other, it is better to begin with someone who rejected the cross-disciplinary dynamics just described. I have argued elsewhere that particularism is especially a threat to theologians because it points to the specifics of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, something that directly challenges the lives that they currently live. In the meantime, theologians have in large part continued to make non-particularist universal claims because theologia is, after all, the study of (the universal) God. That trajectory has, for the most part, continued even after the interpretive turn in anthropology. Prior to that, both anthropologists and missionaries were, whatever else they were, agents of empire.Īfter Franz Boas utilized anthropological methods specifically understood as science to stress the individual particularity of cultures and therefore to refute colonialism’s hierarchical cultural rankings, theology was even more on the outs. Missionaries, who had been serving as key informants for the earlier, armchair anthropologists, became competitors and thus enemies in the field of souls. More, a developing aspect of the professionalization of anthropology was the requirement that researchers do their own fieldwork. Pairing, or even conversing, with theology, was out of the question. The fact that they are considered to be such now is a historically contingent arrangement that developed in large part out of anthropology seeking to establish itself as an academic discipline – a science – precisely at the time that the academy was rejecting theology. I want to suggest that the best place to begin is with someone who did not write as if the two were separate, even opposed disciplines. var target = $(this).children('a').attr("title") //$(".side_button").children('a').This symposium asks what considerations are currently moving anthropologists and theologians to look to and even draw from the discipline of the other. The story of a Black writer and anthropologist who committed her career to studying and celebrating African American folklore and culture. Harlem Renaissance Author and Anthropologist Life Story: Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) Home / Confidence and Crises, 1920-1948 / The Jazz Age / Life Story: Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) New-York Historical Society Library.Īstronaut Ellen Ochoa, mission specialist, carries her son Wilson Miles-Ochoa following the STS-96 crew return at Ellington Field. “Oportunidades Iguales Para Las Mujeres En El Trabajo y La Educaccion”, Women’s Strike for Equality, New York, Fifth Avenue, 1970, Eugene Gordon photograph collection, 1970-1990. Smithsonian Institute Archives Image # SIA 2010-1509. Gertrude Kasebier, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.Ĭhien-shiung Wu (1912-1997), professor of physics at Columbia University, 1963. Gertrude Kasebier (photographer), Zitkala Sa, Sioux Indian and activist, c. University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center. New-York Historical Society Library.Ĭihak and Zima (photographer), Ida B. Unidentified African American woman in uniform, 1861. Unknown photographer, A Typical Boomer Family, ca. Jarena Lee: giving an account of her call to preach the gospel, frontispiece. The Historic New Orleans Collection, acc. Chapultepec Castle, Mexico City.įrançois (Franz) Fleischbein (artist), Portrait of Betsy, 1837. Nicolás Enríquez de Vargas (artist), Portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, ca. Life Story: Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) - Women & the American Story
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