Volume 49, Number 14 · September 26, 2002
The High Priestess of the Vernacular
By Darryl Pinckney
Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States
by Zora Neale Hurston, edited and with an introduction by Carla Kaplan, and a foreword by John Edgar Wideman
HarperCollins, 279 pp., $25.00
Zora Neale Hurston, high priestess of the vernacular, was the only black student at Barnard College in 1925. She became a dedicated student of anthropology under Columbia University's Franz Boas, the pioneer of deep fieldwork and the author of The Mind of Primitive Man (1911). Boas faulted white anthropologists for judging different peoples by values that may not be universally applicable. He argued that cultures must be evaluated according to how well people had adapted to their environments. Ruth Benedict, Elsie Clews Parsons, Melville Herskovits, and Margaret Mead also got their start under Boas.
Review, 4998 words
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