“Mouths don’t empty themselves unless ears are sympathetic and knowing,” wrote the twentieth-century anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston in Mules and Men, her collection of African American oral histories, sermons, songs, and folk tales. Hurston’s words could have been a mantra for sociocultural anthropologist Todne Thomas, who embedded herself in Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American religious communities in the American South as research for her forthcoming book.... Read more about Excavating the Spiritual Genius of Black People
