A wonderfully written and compelling account of the resilience and agency of children in Haiti. It celebrates the joy and strength they find in even the harshest of circumstances, which so often goes unnoticed by the well-meaning foreigners who have flooded into the country hoping to ‘save’ them.

- Heather Montgomery, Professor of Anthropology and Childhood, the Open University, UK,

This balanced, well-reasoned volume offers a broader perspective on European and American understandings of childhood in Haiti as well as a critique of Haitian educational institutions.

Choice

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.
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Introduction: Toward a Critical Anthropology of Childhood in Haiti
1. Pouring Love In: Emotion, Power, and White Saviorism in Haitian Childhood
2. Learning to See: Tout sa w we se pa sa
3. "These Are My Children!": White Love and Child Rescue in Haiti
4. Becoming Someone: Personhood and Education Among Haiti’s Marginalized Children
5. Bringing Them “Home”: Childhood and the Remaking of Family in Haiti
6. The Sensorium: Embodied Being and Learning in Children's Worlds
7. Beyond Trauma: Caring and Belonging in Children's Lives
8. Practicing Hope: Movement, Personhood, and Survivance in Haitian Childhood
9. From Doing Good to Good Doing: Haiti, Childhood, and an Anthropological Praxis for the Future
References
Index

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A critical anthropological study of contemporary childhood in Haiti based on ethnographic fieldwork with vulnerable children.
Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork carried out over a period of 13 years with vulnerable children in Haiti

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781350321373
Publisert
2025-08-21
Utgiver
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; Bloomsbury Academic
Vekt
360 gr
Høyde
232 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Dybde
16 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
240

Forfatter

Om bidragsyterne

Diane M. Hoffman is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Education in the Department of Educational Leadership, Foundations and Policy at the University of Virginia School of Education, USA. She is the author of Quiet Riot: The Culture of Teaching and Learning in Schools (2015), and co-editor of Parenting in Global Perspective: Negotiating Ideologies of Kinship, Self, and Politics (2013).