A Critical Anthropology of Childhood in Haiti - by Diane M Hoffman

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

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).