| Anthropology's importance for modernist literature has been clear since T. S. Eliot's references to Frazer in The Waste Land. Under Eliot's influence, however, discussions have mostly focused on Anglo-American writers and the evolutionary anthropology practiced by Frazer, which was already outdated by 1922. Analyzing the work of Lady Augusta Gregory and Zora Neale Hurston complicates this account of modernism's and anthropology's intersections. Both writers engaged with cutting-edge anthropological developments in the relativist, field-based work of Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski, among others. Gregory and Hurston, major Irish and Harlem Renaissance figures, respectively, portrayed Irish and African American folk cultures as complex and meaningful, thus contesting racist ideologies that labeled the cultures crude and irrational. Because modern field anthropology also aimed to understand cultures from a sympathetic "insider's" standpoint, it had the potential to further cultural revival's goals. Both Gregory and Hurston did extensive fieldwork that informed both their literary and ethnographic works. But Anglo-American anthropology had also contributed to distorted understandings of the Irish and African Americans in the past, giving Gregory and Hurston reason to be wary of its ethnocentrism and interrogate its innovations. Chapter I argues that, like anthropological discourse at the time, Gregory's folk plays are ambivalently poised between racialist and relativist understandings of Irish folk character as revealed through speech habits. Chapter II compares Hurston's courtroom scenes to Boasian cultural anthropology, arguing that both expose the ethnocentrism of a putatively objective system and offer cultural relativism as a corrective. Chapter III considers Gregory's unusual fieldwork situation. Because Gregory observed her neighbors over twenty years, she realized that folk culture could adapt to changing historical conditions, unlike the anthropologists who journeyed to distant places where they believed local culture was dying out. Chapter IV analyzes Hurston's formal innovations in both ethnography and literature as a critique of cultural holism, showing that African American culture was meaningful even though it was not pure and whole. Gregory's and Hurston's work complicates the typical account of modernist interest in folk culture as largely nostalgic; through critical engagement with modern anthropology, they portrayed folk culture as capable of coexisting with modernity. |
