Abstract
Zora Neale Hurston's legacy as an anthropologist lies in the corpus and methodology of her research on Africana religions. Hurston's attention to Africana religious subjectivities highlights the methodological challenges of employing anthropology as a discipline to study Africana religious subjectivities. In this article, I will focus specifically on (1) the difficulties of working with and in a colonial discipline to produce knowledge, (2) the navigation of insider/outsider status in Africana religious communities, and (3) the expectation of reporting findings to academic and state institutions. I will argue that Hurston's work on Africana religions pioneered the future direction of the field. Through a deep interrogation of Hurston's work in Tell My Horse, The Sanctified Church, and Mules and Men, we witness her dexterity as a transnational ethnographer, using transdiscplinary registers to foreground critical analytical, contextual, and methodological epistemologies by which to approach the study of Africana religious subjectivities.
