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Zora Neale Hurston
- 1891-1960
- African American Author who is associated with the Harlem Renaissance
- Known as a novelist, thereby making her anthropological contributions considerably less known
- Throughout her work, interest in gender, sexuality, and race
- Grew up in an Black town, father was a religious leader and town political official
- Adopted use of recording equipment in research (visual Anthropology)
- Student of Boas at Barnard/Columbia University
- Boas: race, language and culture were independent of one another; immigration; fieldwork
- questioned assumptions about universal human nature, evolutionary thought in culture, racial determinism
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Jamaican context
- Jamaica still a British colony - undergoing crisis
- Maroon community: formed by escaped slaves who had mixed with indigenous population, established through Queen Nanny
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Haiti context
- US occupation prior to research
- time of resolution to prior political instabilities
- president at the time of research engaged in a repression of opposition, press, prioritized his own benefits over benefits of people
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Voodoo context
result of transatlantic slave trade triangle and consequent syncretism of Christianity and traditions brought from Africa
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ethnographic present
- location: jamaica and haiti
- populations: the maroons, jamaican and haitian practitioners of voodoo
- date of fieldwork: 1936 - 1937
- publication: 1938
- major themes: legacy of and resistance to slavery through surviving communities and historical memory, accounts of voodoo
- issues: imperialistic tendencies, vague descriptions, presence of bias
- relevant events concurrent with fieldwork: rafael trujillo, president of dominican republic, orders genocide on haitians within dominican republic in 1937; crisis in jamaica escalates into widespread violence and rioting in 1938
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Jamaica chronology
- 1930s - crisis due to slow pace of political advance
- 1938 - widespread violence and rioting
- jamaica still an english colony
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Haiti chronology
- 1492 - 1804 - atlantic slave trade
- 1804 - haitian revolution ends slavery
- 1911 - 1915 - six different presidents who are either killed or exiled including president Simon and president Leconte
- July 1915 - massacre of 167 political prisoners by Vilbrun Guillaume Sam and subsequent lynching
- 1915 - 1934 - US Occupation
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