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Ira E. Harrison and Faye V. Harrison, eds. African American Pioneers in Anthropology. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999. 296 pp. ISBN 0-25202430-3, $49.95, cloth; ISBN 0-252-06736-3, $21.95, paper.
Zora Neale Hurston (1901-1960) is better known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), than for her work as an anthropologist and folklorist in Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). In African American Pioneers in Anthropology, editors Ira E. Harrison and Faye V. Harrison have compiled thirteen life histories about a generation of black scholars, including Hurston, who became anthropologists between 1920 and 1955. The intellectual biographies in Pioneers describe anthropology from the vantage point of its earliest African American adherents, their careers, and the theoretical and methodological interventions they brought to the discipline in the first half of the twentieth century. Concerned with racial ideologies, native perspectives, and the often pejorative representations of African and African American cultures, these anthropologists worked in a "vindicationist" mode to counter racial denigration with academic theory and social activism. The editors suggest that this vindicationist framework forms "the clearest continuity in African-American intellectual history over the past few centuries" (12).
The biographies in Pioneers are at their best when they illustrate the strategies, including activism and vindicationist praxis, that African American anthropologists used to counter their experiences of institutional racism, gender subordination, and paternalism. These experiences stymied, and sometimes ended, the anthropological research of some pioneering African Americans working in the African Diaspora in Europe, the Caribbean, and North, South, and Central America. Some found work outside of the discipline, or left academia altogether. Others were driven to greater rigor and productivity.
Though Louis Eugene King (1898-1981) was one of the first people to complete a study about rural African Americans, he never found employment in academia, and eventually worked for the Navy. Despite his signif icant abilities, William S. Willis, Jr. (1921-1983), referred to in both Hymes and Mullings, also found it difficult to find an academic job. In 1964, after a long and frustrating search, he became the first African American faculty member at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Expected to teach more classes than the rest of the faculty, he was...