Oral Heritage
Hurston takes on this ambitious project of recording African American folktales as a function of the preservation of this oral tradition. Most of the stories have never been written down before, having been passed down between generations by word of mouth. Consequently most of the stories are repeated but with dramatic changes in the details. They've evolved alongside the people, many still pertaining to slavery and forced migration. Because they weren't allowed to own material possessions, people of African heritage in America have passed down a heritage of folklore to their descendants. These stories are the culture, making Hurston's work especially meaningful in light of how spare the recorded history of these peoples had previously remained.
Cultural Immersion
Although Hurston is gathering stories about her own culture, she does not belong among the insiders in the communities she visits. They are close-knit people who stick together, not often accepting outsiders like Hurston. In order to gather these tales, then, she must prove her trustworthiness to the locals. She often does just as much work getting to know folks as she does actually recording the stories. When she visits a new town, she looks to ingratiate herself with the people by immersing herself in their culture. Sometimes this looks like raising chaos with strangers in a bar, like the time Hurston gets involved in a brawl in Eatonville.
Integrated Cultural Anthropology
Effectively the work Hurston performs for this book is cultural anthropology. She is recording a detailed account of African-American culture at the intersection of West African, Native American, and some European traditions. This means that Hurston not only writes down the folktales -- her stated purpose for the book, -- but she also records how she gained the information, what the towns are like, and how these folks first heard the stories themselves. Hurston includes a glossary, hoodoo recipes, and multiple other indexes of folk practices related to African American culture in the South. All of these methods, including the explanation of their accrual, combine to form the summation of the book in an integrated approach to cultural anthropology.
