Since the 1980s scholars have assessed Zora Neale Hurston's major ethnographic texts, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), by defining the contours of her ‘anthropological imagination’, charting her relationship with Boas's school of anthropology, and examining her multiple subjectivities. More specifically, Domina's analysis of Mules and Men and Tell My Horse provides an insight into the autobiographical strand of the work in the context of the conflicting demands of an academic discipline, with its rules and regulations, and the more pragmatic expectations of the publishing world. With Tell My Horse, the geographical displacement effected to collect material outside of the United States, namely on the Caribbean islands of Jamaica and Haiti, places Hurston's text squarely within the discourse of Afromodernism and its diasporic dimension. It addresses the traces of African cultures in the folklore and rituals of peoples of African descent that were being documented by anthropologists in the 1930s at a time when these elements were being rehabilitated by artists and intellectuals in relation to European and Western culture more generally. Indeed, the question that needs to be asked is that of the relationship between the self that is revealed in the explicitly autobiographical material of the essays and the autobiography proper (Dust Tracks on a Road [1942]), and the representation of the self that emerges from Hurston's trip to Jamaica and Haiti, since the book is an intricate and puzzling mixture of scientific observation and personal impressions.