the diasporic relations in this text in relation to the center-periphery model of exchange presented by ethnography. In comparison to Tell My Horse, which heavily emphasizes transnational politics and imperialist encounters between Americans and Haitians, Their Eyes, written during Hurston’s stay in Haiti, minimizes colonizer-colonized dynamics and instead foregrounds the shared social and political concerns of African Diasporic communities (specifically Haiti, Harlem, and Eatonville). Their Eyes has typically been understood in local/regional terms, but I place it within a global context of African Diaspora writing.
In contrast to scholars who argue that the narrative’s turn to the rural South and to the Caribbean displaces African Americans’ increasing movement to urban, Northern centers in the twenties, I argue that Hurston sought to explore through metaphor and symbolism the social and political concerns of African Americans in the North, South, and throughout the Caribbean. In other words, where some might argue that Hurston was stuck in the proverbial village at precisely the moment when significant numbers of African Americans were striking out for the city, I counter with the notion that Hurston found in the village many of the same conflicts, desires, and aspirations as her more urban-identified peers around the Diaspora. By symbolically associating her protagonist, Janie, with the Haitian lwa (goddess) Ezili, Hurston was able to explore those elements that enabled or hindered a collective self-expression and self-determination, the very characteristics that Alain Locke identified with the modern, urban New Negro.35 Haitian Vodou provided Hurston with the ideal vehicle to voice African Diasporic peoples’ (especially women’s) views on their social status and experiences, demonstrating that “primitive” peoples and their traditions had something to say about the modern world.
Renaissance writers accepted social science discourse, assuming a stance in their fiction, memoirs, and ethnographies that questions an intellectual legacy of objectifying cultural and racial others in ways that are both indebted to the disciplines of sociology and anthropology and that break with the disciplines’ methods of writing culture. For example, while modern anthropologists were trained to guard against their own subjective interpretations of other cultures by immersing themselves in the subject’s milieu through participant-observation fieldwork, the New Negro writers I investigate represent their encounters in the “field” as full of ambivalence and conflict. In other words, they depict fieldwork as a power-inflected site of social conflict and negotiation as opposed to a setting in which to view “primitive” cultures in their natural settings. Where Franz Boas recognized that the social sciences could be used to critique and radically rethink the status quo, the African American writers I discuss wrote into their narratives their perception that the ethnographic endeavor could also reflect rather than transcend the status quo. Their writing and reflections reveal their awareness of the social and political reform that could be achieved through the practice of a progressive anthropology, what Walter Jackson calls an “applied anthropology.”36 Yet they also reveal their awareness of ethnography’s inherently political nature, casting doubt on the orthodoxy of their time, which contended that anthropology could and should be a “politically neutral quest for objective knowledge and truth about the human condition.”37
A paradigmatic example of how this neutrality was maintained can be seen in the juxtaposition of Bronislaw Malinowski’s ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific, published in 1922, which according to James Clifford creates “the fashioned wholes of a self and of a culture,”38 and his diaries published in 1967, which take advantage of the genre’s “tendency toward selfscrutiny” to reflect on his self-doubt and sexual fantasies about and exasperation with the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands, whom he viewed as brutes.39 The important point here is that Malinowski considered it an imperative to keep private reflection and interpersonal conflict from his ethnographic depiction because to meld the two would disrupt his representation of the culture (and his relationship to it) as whole. In their overtly ethnographic narratives, New Negro ethnographers/writers move habitually between introspection and representation of the other, between subjective analysis and clinical detachment.40 In doing so, they highlight the possibility of scientific objectivity to slip into objectification, anticipating by decades the kinds of questions about knowledge production being asked by current anthropologists. In critiquing the ethnographic framework within which they worked, they confront the classist, racist, and cultural biases of the dominant society and challenge their readers to imagine a different set of relations between the powerful and the oppressed.
Chapter 2
Men of Science in the Post-Slavery Era
Evolutionists to Environmentalists: The Development of Modern Anthropology and Constructions of Race
In choosing to appropriate classical anthropology’s cultural pluralist, antiracist agenda, New Negro intellectuals intervened on a long history of antiBlack and anti-African rhetoric and practices that extended back before the nineteenth century, when the notion of a Great Chain of Being provided one measure of human civilization. This human taxonomy positioned Africans near or at the bottom of the social hierarchy and Europeans at the top, linking the status of the “lesser” races with their presumed fall from grace. When in the nineteenth century scientific rationales for theories of racial inferiority supplanted the theological frame that had previously been used to validate these ideas of social order, the scientific literature was often heavily intertwined with religious arguments to the extent “that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began.”1 The sense that Africans and their New World descendants deserved in some way their own subordination by virtue of divine ordination persisted even as scientific discourse began to supplant religious ideologies of social formations. The most popular explanation in the nineteenth century for the existence of racial stratification was social Darwinism, a theory that used biological evolution as a metaphor for social development. Lewis Henry Morgan, a New York lawyer who became an ethnologist, proved highly influential in this development because he “adapted Darwinian natural selection to a [Herbert] Spencerian notion of absolute cultural progress. Morgan concluded that the races were in different stages of physical and cultural evolution that could be linked to three stages of cultural achievement: savagery, barbarism, and civilization Not surprisingly, he positioned the Aryan race at the apex of civilization and Africans “in the middle stage of barbarism” (Hovenkamp 654). By 1908, most American experts on race were evolutionists who theorized that racial characteristics were biologically determined, but the racist ideologies of the previous era remained fixed in the nations consciousness.
Anthropology gained a prominent role in the construction of racial ideologies and, thus, underwent a significant shift in status at this historical juncture. The discipline situated itself as a science at a time when the sciences were preoccupied with new biological theories; as a result Darwinist analogies dominated the field for almost a century. This generation of anthropologists believed that “to explain man’s physical structure was to explain mankind” (Hovenkamp 652). Consequently race experts, led in the social sciences by ethnologists such as the Briton Edward Tylor and the American Lewis Henry Morgan, argued that some characteristics, such as intelligence, do evolve. Some even professed that Blacks might eventually develop an intelligence equal to Caucasians, but even these more progressive thinkers concluded that Africans’ cultural and intellectual development would take so long to evolve that racial differences were virtually permanent.2
Modern anthropology has left a mixed legacy in that it reinforced racialist discourses while also sowing the seeds for a more progressive and relativistic view of cultures. For example, although Tylor followed an evolutionary model of culture that prompted him to study “primitive” cultures as “exempla of the lower rungs of the human evolutionary scale,” succeeding generations of anthropologists were indebted to his definition of culture as a “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Ironically, Tylor’s notion of culture as a complex whole comprised of “functional and integral parts” undercut the Victorian
