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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.>
List of contents
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
About the author
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)
.
