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The propagated artistic freedom and moral autonomy contrasted limitations that Hurston was forced to accept when she signed a contract at the end of 1927, mediated by Alain Locke, with the white patroness Mrs. R. Osgood Mason for the private financing of her folklore research. The contract guaranteed her “godmother” property and publication rights to the research material. Mason did indeed support the work quite generously, in stages, but prohibited Hurston from talking about the progress of her research. Whereas Herskovits, from a distanced perspective, had the opportunity to publish the results of his field studies on the African remnants in the Americas on a regular basis, and could discuss his work internationally with colleagues, Hurston, who mutated from object of study of “typical black” characteristics to an involved and pioneering researcher in the area of African American popular culture, religion, and magic practices, was contractually prohibited from announcing her discoveries and sharing her enthusiasm with others. Mason first authorized publication of Mules and Men in 1935, after making editorial interventions in the material. As greatly as Hurston suffered from the constraints of this knowledge production, in particular, because her scientific collaboration with Franz Boas, whom she revered (for Hurston, the “King of Kings”) was reduced to a minimum, which put her in “a terrible nervous state,” she nonetheless, in the end, cleverly transformed these constraints in her characteristic transdisciplinary form of depiction of transcultural practices and additionally managed to retain the presence of several of the difficult conditions of her own practice in the text.
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