ABSTRACT
Many studies dealing with Caribbean culture have been lost in the undefined spaces of overlapping fields and genres. Texts by novelist/folklorist/anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, 1938; 1983; 1990; 1992; 1995) and choreographer/anthropologist Katherine Dunham (Island Possessed, 1969; 1994) fall somewhere between anthropology, ethnographic document, and travelogue. Tell My Horse is a stylistic melange including anecdotes about Hurston’s travels and travails, astute portraiture, comprehensive historical accounts, keen political analyses, detailed ethnographic descriptions of religious ceremonies, and direct folkloric cataloguing. Island Possessed collects Dunham’s observations on Haitian life, ranging from elaboration on political events, portraits of well-known historical figures, analyses of Haiti’s “color” nomenclature, to highly personal descriptions of her processes of initiation into vodoun.3 Filmmaker Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953, 1970, 1990, 1991) has been recognized as a classic ethnographic study of Haitian vodoun, although reviewers do not hesitate to point out the “special” nature of this book. Inside the jacket of the 1991 edition, Divine Horsemen is described as “a classic of its type-an anthropological investigation written with the special insight of personal encounter.” In other words, Deren wrote as both an ethnographer and a vodoun initiate. While nurse/entrepreneur Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857; 1984; 1988) is suspended not only between the genres of travelogue, autobiography, and historical account, but also between fields, it is more often classified as Slavic history because of Seacole’s recording of events in the Crimean War, although a large part of it deals with her travels in the Caribbean basin.
