SOURCE: Jordan, Rosan Augusta. “Not into Cold Space: Zora Neale Hurston and J. Frank Dobie as Holistic Folklorists.” Southern Folklore 49, no. 2 (1992): 109-31.

In the following essay, Jordan finds similarities between Mules and Men and J. Frank Dobie's Tongues of the Monte, maintaining that because of their unconventional formats, both books offer “a more holistic version of the folklore they present.”

The various collectors of Irish folklore have, from our point of view, one great merit, and from the point of view of others, one great fault. They have made their work literature rather than science, and told us of the Irish peasantry rather than of the primitive religion of mankind, or whatever else the folklorists are on the mad after. To be considered scientists they should have tabulated their tales in forms like grocers' bills—item the fairy king, item the queen. Instead of this they have caught...