Sketchnoting Zora Neale Hurston: The Early Creative Ethnographer

[She integrated imaginative practice in deeply grounded research: do you?]

Ever since I took an ethnographic writing course which introduced me to her work, Zora Neale Hurston has been a trusted reading and thinking companion.

Zora is probably one of the most densely ethnographically saturated authors I know, and yet the generosity and openness of her writing invite readers in, no matter their background.

It is no coincidence that Zora is my go-to when in anthropological doubt: whether I am in crisis with my discipline at large, or with my own methods, coming back to her feels like taking a breath and entering a comfort zone of coziness. I return to her texts when I want a break from obscure jargon or tediously detailed descriptions.

Yet what Zora offers, albeit in the most creative and sometimes casual forms, is deep anthropological work grounded in theory and practice.

I am particularly drawn to her as a fellow creative ethnographer: someone who documents human life using artistic methods alongside standard ethnography. Long before those terms were brought into shape, she experimented with and even defined their contours. It’s no surprise that when asked to sketch a portrait of a source of inspiration for the Scriberia course Sketchnoting: Drawing as a Communication Tool on Domestika, I went back to Zora.

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Going About the Sketchnote ✏️

As someone who has taught ethnographic sketchnoting, I should probably embrace what I teach: sketchnoting is all about DIY and taking the risk to draw even when you think you can’t. But representing an idol was daunting. To keep it simple yet identifiable, I used tracing paper for Zora’s portrait, sketching over a photograph onto my iPad. This might not be the way of a “true artist”, but since I am less of that than a “true anxious”, this gave me enough confidence to breathe and continue.

After that, the usual sketchnoting challenge was one of balance: too much detail risks illegibility, while oversimplification can empty the page of substance.

In addition, Zora’s life and work resist linearity and neat boxes. So I spread the layout across two pages to capture how she wove anthropology, literature, performance, sound, and film into something larger than any single discipline. Yet it quickly became clear that I could only gesture at the detours of her life, and the layers of her work.

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Zora’s Life & Work 🧑🏾‍🎨

I started simple, and ultra basic, knowing not everyone may know of Zora Neale Hurston, but also resisting the temptation to overwhelm the reader with too much:

• born in Alabama in 1891,

• immersed in Harlem Renaissance,

• trained at Columbia with Franz Boas,

• and, heartbreakingly, dying in Florida in 1960, penniless and almost forgotten (I added this part later as I had forgotten my notes and ran out of space).

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That trajectory matters, but what grips me more are the breath of work and depth of creativity that Zora brought to her practice as an anthropologist.

She approached fieldwork as embodied and sensory, not just intellectual. She knew what it meant to navigate the insider/outsider divide and wrote across genres on positionality as essential to ethnography. She worked experimentally and decolonially, treating folklore as living knowledge rather than relic.

Her fieldwork stretched from African American everyday life and Hoodoo practices in the US South (notably Florida), to Caribbean Vodou and Obeah in Haiti and Jamaica, to oral testimonies like Barracoon, where she echoed the voice of the last survivor of the Middle Passage (the Atlantic slave trade voyage from Africa to America).

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The Early Creative Ethnographer 💡

Once I felt I had given the reader enough to get an overview of Zora’s life and work, I moved to the right page to focus on her visionary contribution to our discipline as an Early Creative Ethnographer.

As a creative ethnographer myself, this is how I always think of Zora: with passionate admiration and heartfelt affection, and not simply as a writer or anthropologist, but as a kindred spirit refusing to stay within disciplinary or academic lanes. She always took the risk to try her hands and mind on everything.

Her writing spilled across genres: novels, poetry, academic texts, journalism, and even songs. Performance was integral, whether through theater, ritual, or dance. But her creativity should never be confused with aesthetics for aesthetics’ sake. Her interventions were deeply political.

She made films and visual recordings that reframed Blackness on screen through what Autumn Womack (2015) refers to as “techniques of exposure.” Her audio recordings, while initially commissioned as salvage ethnography, refused the transparency, distance, and extraction that marked the genre. Instead, as Roshanak Kheshti (2015) shows, Zora playfully intervened through “sonic infidelities”: singing, clapping, and addressing the listener directly, insisting on co-presence across time and space.

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Final Quotes 📋

Finally, while sketching the layout, I chose to place four of my Zora’s favorite quotes around the pages in grey:

• “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying without a purpose.” (Dust Tracks)

• “Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.” (Dust Tracks)

• “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” (Their Eyes)

• “Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey’s back.” (Moses)

Together, those quotes remind me that her curiosity—and therefore *ours* who follow in her tracks—has to always be fierce, and that writing and research have to carry both wisdom and bite.

For those of us working at the intersections of ethnography and creativity today, Zora Neale Hurston is more than a historical figure: she is a guide. A reminder that anthropology is always fundamentally multimodal, that creativity is not a supplement to scholarship but its lifeblood, and that the vernacular—the sounds, rhythms, and textures of everyday life—holds knowledge as rich as any archive we constitute in its imprint.

Revisiting Zora always leaves me wondering how much more daring our field could be if we embraced the same unapologetic curiosity she embodied. What would happen if we, too, let go of rigid boundaries; what if we treated art, sound, story, and critical yet creative theory as equal partners in how we know? I’d love to hear how you experiment with creativity in your own ethnographically grounded work or ethnography in your creative endeavors—or what holds you back?

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References 📚

• Hurston, Zora Neale. 2020 [1925] Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance. Amistad.

• Hurston, Zora Neale. 2018 [1931] Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo. Amistad.

• Hurston, Zora Neale. 2008 [1935] Mules and Men. Amistad.

• Hurston, Zora Neale. 2021 [1937] Their Eyes Were Watching God. Amistad.

• Hurston, Zora Neale. 2009 [1939] Moses, Man of the Mountain. Amistad.

• Hurston, Zora Neale. 2010 [1942] Dust Tracks on a Road: A Memoir. Amistad.

Also:📄

• Charnov, Elaine S. 1998. “The Performative Visual Anthropology Films of Zora Neale Hurston.” Film Criticism 23 (1): 38–39.

• Kheshti, Roshanak. 2015. “Modernity’s Radical Ear and the Sonic Infidelity of Zora Neale Hurston’s Recordings.” In Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music, NYU Press, 125–142.

• Robbins, Helen A. 1991. “The Ethnography of Zora Neale Hurston: A Postmodern Writer Before Her Time.” Arizona Anthropologist 7.

• Womack, Autumn. 2015. “‘The Brown Bag of Miscellany’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Practice of Overexposure.” Black Camera 7 (1): 115–33.

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