Sex, Family and Fertility in Haiti

Reviews Rich, sophisticated, authentic, provocative, the work of a genuine anthropologist. (Robert Lawless, Wichita State University) Schwartz challenges prevailing wisdom in the field of demography with a strong set of data. He shows the relationship between marriage, family, fertility, agriculture, and emigration in rural Haiti. He relates beliefs with behavior and opportunities and strategies forRead More

Timothy T Schwartz, Ph.D. Dissertation

Fertility among farmers in Jean Rabel, Haiti, is high, perhaps the highest biologically possible given the prevalence of infectious diseases, low calorie diets, high rates of female malnutrition, high female labor demands, and high rates of male absenteeism. High fertility is reinforced by what is here called the pronatal socio-cultural fertility complex, which includes theRead More

Haiti Anthropology Brief: Importance of Housebuilding and Local Cost of Building a House in Rural Haiti

I have put this brief together with the post-earthquake housebuilding craze in mind. After the 2010 earthquake, international organizations did a lot of housebuilding in Haiti. Yet, there is a whole lot about the topic that seemingly no one at the time was interested in learning. And so here I want to get it downRead More

Violent Women in Haiti: Ethnographic and Survey Data

There is a great deal of concern in the NGO community about violence against Haitian women. Google ‘Haiti GBV’ and you’ll see that it’s a veritable rallying cry for feminine interventions and donations. It’s always good to help people, especially those who are victims of violence. But the vast majority of people seeking to helpRead More

The Sexual Moral Economy in Rural Haiti

Rural Haitian women assiduously negotiate sexual acquiescence to men and they do so with the goal of material gain. Ira Lowenthal (1984: 22) first described this behavior in detail when he reported that women in his research community referred to their genitals as intere-m (my assets), lajan-m (my money), or manmanlajan-m (my capital), in additionRead More

Explaining Caribbean Family Patterns

The anthropology of the Caribbean has been called “the battle ground for competing theories regarding family structure” (D’Amico-Samuels 1988: 785). Anthropologists were confounded by a distinct regional family structure, including late age at marriage, high rates of births to single women, matrifocality, child dispersal, de facto polygyny, serial monogamy, and severe beating of children. EarlyRead 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

family studies