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Hurston was shaped by the
scientific conceptualization of race and the study of
folklore, i. e., her Barnard training and that of Franz
Boas, but she was also shaped by the Harlem Renaissance. She
once told a reporter:
I needed my Barnard education to help me
see my people as they really are. But I found that is did
not do to be too detached as I stepped aside to study
them. I had to go back, dress as they did, talk as they
did, live their life, so that I could get into my stories
the world I knew as a child."
Robert Hemenway,"Zora Neale Hurston and the Eatonville
Anthropology." The Harlem Renaissance
Remembered. Ed. Arna Bontemps (New York: Dodd,
Mead, 1972), pp. 212-13.
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