A Critical Anthropology of Childhood in Haiti: Emotion, Power, and White Saviors

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. Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Note on Translation Introduction: Toward a Critical Anthropology of Childhood in Haiti Chapter 1: Pouring Love In: Emotion, Power, and White Saviorism in Haitian Childhood Chapter 2: Learning to See Chapter 3: “These Are My Children!”: White Love and Child Rescue in Haiti Chapter 4: Becoming Someone: Personhood and Education among Haiti’s Marginalized Children Chapter 5: Bringing Them “Home”: Children and the Remaking of Family in Haiti Chapter 6: The Sensorium: Embodied Being and Learning in Children’s Everyday Experience Chapter 7: Beyond Trauma: Caring, Relating and Belonging in Children’s Lives Chapter 8: Practicing Hope: Movement, Personhood, and Survivance in Haitian Childhoods Chapter 9: From Doing Good to Good Doing: Haiti, Childhood, and an Anthropological Praxis for the Future Notes References Index