SOURCE: Lawrence, David Todd. “Folkloric Representation and Extended Context in the Experimental Ethnography of Zora Neale Hurston.” Southern Folklore 57, no. 2 (2000): 119-34.

In the following essay, Lawrence discusses Hurston's Mules and Men and her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God as ethnographies, contending that “folklorists and anthropologists must trust in Hurston's skill as both a scientist and an artist in order to fully comprehend and appreciate the value of these works as exceptional representations of African American culture.”

There is no story that is not true.

—Spoken by Uchendo in Things Fall Apart

Without a doubt one of the emergent, if not dominant, trends in both anthropology and folklore in the last fifteen years has been a significant movement toward a conception of an ethnography that is more fictive in content and more literary or creative in form. This can be witnessed in the publication of major theoretical works...