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

Dominican Republic: Where Did all the Girls Go? Rural Dominican Sex Ratios

First published on June 16, 2012 on Open Salon This white paper treats demographic trends found in mountain park areas of the Dominican Republic. The reason that I am publishing here is that I believe it provides a fascinating contrast to demographic conditions found on the other side of the border, in rural Haiti, where differentialRead More

Big Lies about Little People: The War Between UNICEF and the Orphanages, Battleground Haiti

Following the January 2010 Haiti earthquake there were a lot of exaggerations, truth-twisting and outright lies. But perhaps none exceeded those that came from the mouths of child protection workers and orphanage owners. With UNICEF and Save the Children leading the way, orphanages fanning the flames, and the press publishing almost anything anyone said–no matterRead More

Children of Haiti: The Haitian Restavek and Child Slavery

The cry ‘child slavery’ grabbed world attention in 1998 when Haitian-born Jean-Robert Cadet published his shocking autobiography, From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American, in which he recounted his life as a restavek, the Haitian Creole word for child domestic servant. As the Cadet Foundation website tells potential donors, “As a restavek he lost hisRead More

Children