Sleeping Rough in Port-au-Prince: An Ethnography of Street Children And Violence in Haiti

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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 remedy 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 writer finds these children adopt strategies to carve a social and cultural space for themselves at the contested streets of Port-au-Prince, for my part and collectively playing a surprisingly essential role in Haiti’s civic life as they shape their very own complex political, economic, and cultural identities.

            Kovats-Bernat conducted his fieldwork from 1994 to 2004—the violent decade of Haiti’s transition from a dictatorship to a democracy. Witnessing firsthand the effects of political and civil violence and poverty at the cultural lives of the Haitian people in addition to the 2004 uprising of rise up soldiers against the government, he saw the Haitian president ousted and yet any other violent transfer of political power in Haiti. The book also draws at the writer’s experience living at the streets with scores of street children, in addition to their encounters with paramilitary agents, national policemen, former Haitian army soldiers, aid and development workers, United Nations and U.S. officials, the deposed president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, death squad members, and Vodou bush priests.

            This comprehensive, accessible account of the social and cultural worlds inhabited by dispossessed children in Haiti is really useful for anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars of Latin American, Haitian, and Caribbean studies.

 

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