Hurston's field research focused on which two areas?

• A. Folk customs and languages
• B. Music and dance
• C. Politics and law
• D. Literature and philosophy

Answer: (A)

Hurston’s field research centered on collecting and studying the everyday cultural expressions of African American communities—folk customs, storytelling, songs, and especially language in the form of dialects and speech patterns. She aimed to capture how people talk, tell stories, sing, and perform rituals that carry communal meaning, not just the content of a work or institutional practices. In works like Mules and Men, she documents folk tales, proverbs, chants, and vernacular speech, showing how culture is lived through language and performance. This focus on folk customs and languages explains why it’s the best answer, since politics and law or literature and philosophy weren’t the primary target of her fieldwork, even though music and dance can be part of folk culture.