Anthropology of NGOs: How Activist Humanitarian Aid Agendas Corrupted Social Sciences in the Caribbean

The obscurantism of political and economic agendas has always pervaded discourse on Caribbean family patterns, but anthropology had a stronger materialist orientation in the early and mid-1900s, one that lent itself to rigorous analysis of causation. By the 1970s and 1980s, hope was fading. A fog of research agendas, convoluted analyses, ideational and cultural causalRead More

The Missing Link in Understanding Caribbean Family Patterns: The Neglected Half of Chayanov’s Rule

The basis of my arguments in this article is that children are useful on the non-industrialized farm because they work. The point might at first seem trite and obvious, but in recent decades social scientists have so rigorously denied the economic utility of children in developing areas that the denial itself is fascinating. Moreover, IRead More

Polygyny in Haiti

Little has changed in the 36 years since Melvin Ember (1974) admonished social researchers for what he called androcentric (male-centered) assumptions. The consequence, Ember warned, is too often a false image of the degree to which societies are patriarchic. This is especially true for Haiti. Most scholars and activists present Haitian women as among theRead More

Vulnerability Targeting in Haiti Report (WFP & CNSA 2015)

This study was commissioned by CNSA with the financial and logistic support of WFP and FAO. The objective was to examine the processes that NGO and governmental agencies employ to select beneficiaries of social assistance programs in rural Haiti. The task responds to needs associated with current humanitarian aid and development programs such as: EdeRead More

Gender in Haiti: Short Note on Misrepresentation of Gender in Haiti

Beverly Bell, author of the acclaimed book, Walking on Fire (2001), and one of the most vigilant contributors to the gender struggle in Haiti, illustrates how many feminist activist-scholars have tended to obfuscate gender issues in Haiti when she writes, “Haitian women place at the absolute bottom in female-male life expectancy differential, incidence of teenRead More

Gender in Haiti Report (CARE International 2012)

The quantitative Gender Survey described in this document was conducted under the auspices of Socio-Dig, a Haiti-based research firm. The survey was part of larger evaluation and exploration of gender in Leogane and Carrefour, two communes (counties) near to Port-au-Prince that were among those most heavily impacted by the January 12th 2010 earthquake. Following theRead More

Courting, Marriage and Family