A Critical Anthropology of Childhood in Haiti

A Critical Anthropology of Childhood in Haiti PDF Author: Diane M. Hoffman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350321346
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This book offers a critical anthropological perspective on contemporary childhood in Haiti. It is based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork carried out over a period of 13 years with vulnerable children in Haiti. Diane M. Hoffman raises important questions about how interventions by well-meaning foreigners and 'white saviors' often misrepresent Haitian culture and society as deficient, while privileging their own emotions alongside supposedly universal ideas about children that reinforce their own power to define and intervene in Haitian lives. She argues for a new approach to Haitian childhood that centers children's informal learning and self-education alongside indigenous spirituality and constructions of personhood that can resist the hegemony of neo-colonial and neo-liberal forces. Instead of representing the country and its children as a place of "problems to be solved," the book shows the importance prioritizing aspects of Haitian world-views in order to develop a more culturally-informed understanding of childhood in Haiti that can support genuine social change.

A Critical Anthropology of Childhood in Haiti

A Critical Anthropology of Childhood in Haiti PDF Author: Diane M. Hoffman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350321346
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book

Book Description
This book offers a critical anthropological perspective on contemporary childhood in Haiti. It is based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork carried out over a period of 13 years with vulnerable children in Haiti. Diane M. Hoffman raises important questions about how interventions by well-meaning foreigners and 'white saviors' often misrepresent Haitian culture and society as deficient, while privileging their own emotions alongside supposedly universal ideas about children that reinforce their own power to define and intervene in Haitian lives. She argues for a new approach to Haitian childhood that centers children's informal learning and self-education alongside indigenous spirituality and constructions of personhood that can resist the hegemony of neo-colonial and neo-liberal forces. Instead of representing the country and its children as a place of "problems to be solved," the book shows the importance prioritizing aspects of Haitian world-views in order to develop a more culturally-informed understanding of childhood in Haiti that can support genuine social change.

Sleeping Rough in Port-au-Prince

Sleeping Rough in Port-au-Prince PDF Author: J. Christopher Kovats-Bernat
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Port-au-Prince (Haiti)
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
"In this ethnographic analysis of the cultural lives of children who are "sleeping rough" in Port-au-Prince, Kovats-Bernat expands the traditional bounds of anthropological thought, which have only recently permitted a scholarly treatment of "the child" as a valuable informant, relevant witness, and active agent of social change. Refuting the commonplace notion that street children are unsocialized, Hobbesian mongrels, the author finds these children adopt strategies to carve a social and cultural space for themselves on the contested streets of Port-au-Prince, individually and collectively playing a vital role in Haiti's civic life as they shape their own complex political, economic, and cultural identities"--Back cover.

The Haiti Exception

The Haiti Exception PDF Author: Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1781382999
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
This collection of essays considers the ways and extent of Haiti's 'exceptionalisation' - its perception in multiple arenas as definitively unique with respect not only to the countries of the North Atlantic, but also to the rest of the Americas. Painted at once as repulsive and attractive, abject and resilient, singular and exemplary, Haiti has long been framed discursively by an extraordinary epistemological ambivalence. The nation has served at once as cautionary tale, model for humanitarian aid and development projects, and point of origin for general theorizing of the so-called Third World. What to make of this dialectic of exemplarity and alterity? How to pull apart this multivalent narrative so as to examine its constituent parts? The contributors to The Haiti Exception take up these and other such questions from a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives, among which Africana Studies, anthrohistory, art history, Black Studies, Caribbean Studies, education, ethnology, Jewish Studies, literary studies, performance studies, and urban studies. As they revise and interrogate their respective praxes, they accept the challenge of thinking about the particular stakes of and motivations for their own commitment to Haiti. Engaging in the decidedly risky anthropological practice of reflexivity, the scholars, activists and other social actors gathered here consider their own often fraught role in constructing Haiti in and as narrative.

Why Haiti Needs New Narratives

Why Haiti Needs New Narratives PDF Author: Gina Athena Ulysse
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819575461
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Winner of the Haitian Studies Association Excellence in Scholarship Award (2015) Mainstream news coverage of the catastrophic earthquake of January 12, 2010, reproduced longstanding narratives of Haiti and stereotypes of Haitians. Cognizant that this Haiti, as it exists in the public sphere, is a rhetorically and graphically incarcerated one, the feminist anthropologist and performance artist Gina Athena Ulysse embarked on a writing spree that lasted over two years. As an ethnographer and a member of the diaspora, Ulysse delivers critical cultural analysis of geopolitics and daily life in a series of dispatches, op-eds and articles on post-quake Haiti. Her complex yet singular aim is to make sense of how the nation and its subjects continue to negotiate sovereignty and being in a world where, according to a Haitian saying, tout moun se moun, men tout moun pa menm (All people are human, but all humans are not the same). This collection contains thirty pieces, most of which were previously published in and on Haitian Times, Huffington Post, Ms Magazine, Ms Blog, NACLA, and other print and online venues. The book is trilingual (English, Kreyòl, and French) and includes a foreword by award-winning author and historian Robin D.G. Kelley.

The Equality of the Human Races

The Equality of the Human Races PDF Author: Joseph-Anténor Firmin
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252071027
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Book Description
"This is the first paperback edition of the only English-language translation of the Haitian scholar Antnor Firmin's The Equality of the Human Races, a foundational text in critical anthropology first published in 1885 when anthropology was just emerging as a specialized field of study. Marginalized for its ""radical"" position that the human races were equal, Firmin's lucid and persuasive treatise was decades ahead of its time. Arguing that the equality of the races could be demonstrated through a positivist scientific approach, Firmin challenged racist writings and the dominant views of the day. Translated by Asselin Charles and framed by Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban's substantial introduction, this rediscovered text is an important contribution to contemporary scholarship in anthropology, pan-African studies, and colonial and postcolonial studies."

Reproducing Inequities

Reproducing Inequities PDF Author: M. Catherine Maternowska
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813538548
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Residents of Haiti face a grim reality of starvation, violence, lack of economic opportunity, and minimal health care. For years, aid organizations have unsuccessfully attempted to alleviate the problems by creating health and family planning centers, including one modern (and, by local standards, luxurious) clinic of Cité Soleil. In Reproducing Inequities, M. Catherine Maternowska argues that we too easily overlook the political dynamics that shape choices about family planning. Through a detailed study of the attempt to provide modern contraception in the community of Cité Soleil, Maternowska demonstrates the complex interplay between local and global politics that so often thwarts well-intended policy initiatives.

Bodies of Knowledge

Bodies of Knowledge PDF Author: Efua Prah
Publisher: African Sun Media
ISBN: 199120132X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Spanning the countries of South Africa, Swaziland, and Ghana, this collection of work brings into focus child and youth experience together as a collage of anthropology, creative writing, poetry, and the fine arts. Woven together by questions related to the political economy of child and youth well-being, identity formation, and the multiple layers through which children articulate their health-narrative, ‘ Bodies of Knowledge’ considers living in and coping with chronic illness, spirit-possession, and death. The growth in Critical Health Humanities and the Arts globally, suggests the desire for blended efforts to draw in a wider breadth of knowledge that cuts across the divided worlds of critical social science and the arts. This book, set in an African context, offers myriad possibilities for cross-disciplinary synergies as learning sites. It is a critical contribution to the field of children and childhood studies.

Anthropology and Humanism

Anthropology and Humanism PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description


Fewer Men, More Babies

Fewer Men, More Babies PDF Author: Timothy T. Schwartz
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739128671
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Based on original ethnographic research conducted in rural Haiti, Timothy T. Schwartz offers an explanation for a demographic paradox that some of the most prominent sociologists and demographers of the twentieth century noted but were never able to explain: among impoverished...

Earthquake in Haiti

Earthquake in Haiti PDF Author: Julian Vigo Phd
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780992835408
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Six weeks after Haiti's 2010 earthquake, onomatopoeically known by Haitians as the "Goudou Goudou," cultural anthropologist and filmmaker, Julian Vigo, went to Port-au-Prince in order to volunteer her skills in the relief efforts. Within three weeks of her arrival in Haiti, Vigo discovered three separate child trafficking schemes-from the illegal adoption schemes of a children's hospital to Haitian NGO entrepreneurs who traffick children across the border of the Dominican Republic to a Haitian clergy member who stands outside the MINUSTAH offices with pictures of children "for sale." Working between permaculture projects, child advocacy NGOs and United Nations agencies such as UNICEF, Julian Vigo chronicles what she witnessed in Haiti's communities, the various UN agencies, the Cluster meetings held between NGOs and UN offices and her work in the field. This book describes the monumental failure of development policies and practices which instead of helping to alleviate misery and poverty are actually instrumental in creating both.