and ethnographers who documented and explicated the language, culture, religion, and philosophy of “primitive” Black cultures.22 They did so at a point when anthropologists began to rework the discipline, institutionalizing and encoding its methods and procedures so as to distance itself from a previous generation who, as David Levering Lewis notes, “located Negroes somewhere on the frontier between the great apes and hominids” and provided the ideological rationale for racial subjugation.23 Black intellectuals found that appropriating the authority of science in the service of battling these stereotypical notions was far from simple. In fact, those who worked overtly as folklorists and ethnographers had to repeatedly assert their suitability for the job. Du Bois struggled, for example, to find a professional placement that matched the prestige of his academic training and impressiveness of his accomplishments. And Hurston repeatedly stressed that her work was scientifically sound, not only to satisfy her own ambitions but also to answer the doubts of her professors, mentors, and grant administrators, who often expressed concern that she lacked the discipline to succeed as an anthropologist.24
Although these writers worked in a number of genres and fields outside of the social sciences, including dance, education, and politics, they used ethnography in some of their most important works of fiction and nonfiction because it provided a clear, powerful, and socially accepted language with which to observe and document a folk culture that many Americans were convinced was populated by dark and primitive others. As W. E. B. Du Bois writes in “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece,” one of the chapters focusing on Dougherty County, Georgia, in The Souls of Black Folk, “And yet how little we really know of these millions, of their daily lives and longings, of their homely joys and sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meaning of their crimes! All this we can only learn by intimate contact with the masses, and not by wholesale arguments covering millions separate in time and space, and differing widely in training and culture.”25
In his biography of Du Bois, Lewis notes that the culture and institutions of the rural South “were as mysterious to most early twentieth-century readers as Livingstone’s Africa” (285). So Du Bois is prominent among the many African American writers who assumed the responsibility of explicating a culture and landscape viewed by their audience as mysterious, foreign, exotic, or strange. These efforts to affirm the value of African American culture took place within a climate in which perceptions of racial difference were intertwined with assumptions of White racial superiority and Black inferiority and that saw little significance in class or regional differences among African Americans. The social consequences of the migration of thousands of Blacks from the rural South to New York City between 1894 and 1915 made such biases all the more acute, fueling the efforts of Black intellectuals, anthropologist Franz Boas, and other racially progressive individuals to develop a persuasive, scientific, and activist response to the totalizing and absolutist discourses of race and racism.26
Du Bois’s image of the Black intellectual lifting the veil and moving back and forth across a racial divide is useful in imagining what most hoped to achieve in their representations of poor and working-class Black cultures to White America. It provides a visual analogue to the ethnographic project, which emphasized, particularly after the 1920s and 1930s, the movement between cultures. In the 1920s, ethnographers were increasingly expected to employ their skills as “trained onlooker[s]” to record and explain the “characteristic behaviors” and rituals of a particular group (Clifford 31). This purportedly objective perspective carried far more weight for readers of ethnographic accounts than did the views of indigenous people on their own lives, much less their opinions about “first world” nations. The materiality of the veil indicates the acceptance of the notion that Black and White societies were clearly distinct from each other, and could be contained and framed by the ethnographer’s gaze. Du Bois’s shifting position behind, above, and across the veil signifies his ability to see both Black and White worlds with an insight that is unique to the Black subject, and perhaps even more presciently, to the Black or native ethnographer. The veil can function as a metaphor for the native ethnographers’ privileged perspective, but their doubled-consciousness also offered them the ideal vantage point from which to survey, critique, and complicate the terms used to categorize humans and the societies they lived in.
Even as New Negro intellectuals appropriated new anthropological theories of race and culture to further their anti-racist agendas, they often revealed a wariness of and confrontation with the discipline’s own absolutist assumptions. They recognized, for example, that scientific detachment could be not only the root of authority for the marginalized subject but also a source of conflict because the scientific imperative encouraged a separation between ethnographers and the subjects of their study.27 Their narratives illustrate the inherent tensions in the notion that “the scientific position of speech is that of an observer fixed on the edge of a space, looking in and/or down upon what is other.”28 Contemporary theorists and cultural critics have recognized that empiricism can result in epistemic violence because “in trying to become ‘objective,’ Western culture made ‘objects of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with them.” “This dichotomy,” Gloria Anzaldua has argued, “is the root of all violence.”29 New Negro intellectuals may have adopted and adapted anthropology to challenge the dichotomy of White humanity and non-Whites’ presumed subhumanity, but they found the discipline lacking because of its continued reification of a Western subject/non-Western object dichotomy under a different guise.30 They saw literature and art as performing the same work as anthropology, adding rhetorical fuel to the fire of rehabilitating the image of Blacks; nonetheless, their engagement with the social sciences was not uncritical and even as they applied social science methods and theories, they continued to identify and challenge practices—including their own—that risked maintaining the subordination of Black peoples.
The paradoxes, ironies, conflicts, and tensions experienced by native ethnographers of the Harlem Renaissance are typical for anthropologists who share the same identities as the subjects of their study. Kath Weston employs the term “virtual anthropologist” to describe such individuals. Weston argues that academia continues to presume the virtual anthropologist’s familiarity and identification with the cultural, racial, and gendered others upon which anthropology is predicated, rendering them incapable of assuming the full authority of the scientist who is imagined as white and male in his “ideal” form.31 She argues that despite this supposition, the virtual anthropologist offers a subject position that problematizes and even collapses the subject/object dichotomy on which conventional ethnographies rely by continually questioning the terms that are used to define her.32 Certainly, this questioning stance can be discerned in the work of these first- and second- generation modern ethnographers whose works are characterized by a dialectical exchange between themselves and the communities they enter, and their queries into the tensions and contradictions between their rhetoric and actions. The deconstruction of binaristic logic, we will see, is a central aim of many of these texts. Rational/irrational, civilized/primitive, modern/traditional, and cosmopolitan/tribal are all oppositions that these writers investigate for their racial, cultural, and even political significance.
The difference between the native ethnographers’ relatively privileged social positions and the subjugation experienced by so many of the “folk” they set out to celebrate could be as much of a source of unease as was their status in the view of the dominant culture. Ethnographic discourse may have had its rhetorical place, but it also had its pitfalls because it emphasized the Black intellectual’s position of superiority and detachment in relation to people who suffered the same political disenfranchisement as they and to whom they thus felt politically and culturally allied. African American documenters of Black culture were in the position to demonstrate both detachment from the culture and an authentic identification with it. A shared racial identity provided them with easier access to their subjects, and gave them an affinity with the experiences and feelings of those they observed, apparently allowing them to render folk culture more realistically and truthfully to their audience. At the same time, class, regional, and national differences could result in mutual incomprehension and distrust. Detached observation pushed and pulled against racial, political, and cultural
