In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

95 3 Folklore Collections R Professional Positions and Situated Representations I cannot tell you how essential it is for me to take beef or some food each time I go to an informant—the moment I don’t, I take myself right out of the Dakota side and class myself with outsiders. If I go, bearing a gift, and gladden the hearts of my informants, with food, at which perhaps I arrange to have two or three informants, and eat with them, and call them by the correct social kinship terms, then later I can go back, and ask them all sorts of questions, and get my information, as one would get favors from a relative. It is hard to explain, but it is the only way I can work. To go at it like a white man, for me, an Indian, is to throw up an immediate barrier between myself and the people. —Ella Cara Deloria, letter to Franz Boas, 1932 I was glad when somebody told me, “You may go and collect Negro folklore.” . . . From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl says from the house top. But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through at that. —Zora Neale Hurston, introduction to Mules and Men THESE REFLECTIONS on folklore from Ella Cara Deloria, the Yankton Nakota writer and anthropologist, and Zora Neale Hurston, the AfricanAmerican novelist, playwright, and folklorist, highlight the contradictions inherent in the position of being a “native ethnographer,” one who studies as an anthropologist the practices of her home community. As Deloria insists in her letter to her mentor, Columbia Professor of Anthropology Franz Boas, her 96 – Folklore Collections relation to her informants as an insider—more specifically, as someone embedded within a kinship system that draws all the members of her community into relation—provides her with ready access to cultural information. But eliciting that information from informants also requires Deloria to follow kinship practices that Boas expressed impatience with, in letters to Deloria that request her to conduct her research more quickly and at less expense.1 These kinship requirements include investments of time and material resources that Deloria tries to explain as she describes her research process: by bringing “beef or some food each time . . . [to] gladden the hearts of [her] informants,” and showing patience by first establishing social relations and only returning “later . . . [to] ask them all sorts of questions,” Deloria ensures that she remains a community insider even as she takes up the role of anthropologist. In these ways Deloria initiates the relationships that she values both as a community member and as an ethnographer by carefully positioning herself in the social space of this community . By following protocol for social visits and calling her informants “by the correct social kinship terms,” Deloria establishes a recognizable relationship with informants as grounds for ethnographic research. To neglect to establish these relations would be “to go at it like a white man”—something that would obstruct rather than facilitate Deloria’s access to the linguistic, religious, and cultural information she seeks and that Boas greatly desires as well.2 Deloria articulates to her mentor what he seems to have failed to grasp from her previous letters: that being a native ethnographer, an insider who brings stores of prior local knowledge to bear upon her research, generates benefits as well as demands that shape Deloria’s ethnographic practice. In contrast to the intimacy that Deloria emphasizes, Zora Neale Hurston, in her innovative folklore collection, Mules and Men, reflects on the value of distance as a technique for generating knowledge. According to Hurston, the native ethnographer must take up at least to some extent the “spy-glass of anthropology ,” inserting distance between herself and the practices of her community in order to understand those practices in new and more thoroughly articulated ways. Hurston’s passage speaks to the capacity of anthropological study to authorize—or perhaps reauthorize—a writer’s serious investigation into the stories, tales, legends, and other cultural productions of a specific community. As Hurston explains, such investigation is not wholly new to her...

Share