Tag Archives: Caribbean

Something to Laugh About: A Few Thoughts on Humor in Post-Earthquake Haiti

[This is a guest post by Laura Wagner, and is part of our series Reflections on Haiti. Laura is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.]

“Humor is one of the fugitive forms of insubordination.”
– Donna Goldstein, Laughter Out of Place

It is January 12 again. This week is making everything feel raw again. What’s an anniversary, really? Why should the 365-day cycle back to a calendar date, an orbit around the sun, have anything to do with anything? But then, January 12 — douz janvye — like 9/11 for Americans, has become a symbol in its own right. The date is more than just the anniversary of the quake. Douz janvye 2011 means that the international community’s eyes are on Haiti again. Journalists and camera crews are back and asking “How is Haiti doing, a year after the quake?” And the strange thing is, it might be the one week when no one wants to answer that question, when people just want to have the space to remember or to avoid their ghosts.

Today there will be stories about the ongoing failure of international aid, the undisbursed promised donor funds, the decay and absence of the Haitian state. There will be stories about dreadful conditions in the camps. There will be the predictable half-hearted attempts at writing something with a positive spin – a few tired human interest stories premised on “hope” and “resilience.” I want to write something different. I’m supposed to write about the anniversary, but I want to write about jokes.

Haitians are very funny. (How’s that for anthropological nuance?) They like to tease. They like jokes—silly, raunchy, or political. The observation that hardship and humor go hand-in-hand is hardly novel or original; it borders on cliché. Yet humor is something that doesn’t come through in most mainstream media and humanitarian depictions of Haiti, which largely focus on those details of life that are deemed most immediate and newsworthy: the earthquake; the spread of cholera; the ongoing plight of people living in the camps, coping with loss and deprivation and faced with eviction; unfolding political upheaval. All those things are important to know and to act upon, to be sad and enraged about. At the same time, collectively these kinds of news have a flattening effect, rendering individual Haitians exemplary victims who can represent the majority of victimized Haitians, but erasing the kinds of details that make them recognizable, relatable and…human.

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Mobiles, Money and Mobility in Haiti

[This is a guest post by Heather Horst and Erin B. Taylor, and is part of our series Reflections on Haiti. Heather is an Associate Project Scientist at the University of California, Irvine. Erin is a Lecturer at the University of Sydney Department of Anthropology. For more on their collaborative efforts, click here.]

Just over a year ago on January 7th, 2010, Erin Taylor (see www.erinbtaylor.com) and I received notification that our proposed project on money, migration and mobile phones on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic (link) had been officially funded by Bill Maurer’s Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. Excited by the prospect of conducting new research, Erin and I exchanged emails and set a date to begin to plan what we anticipated would be a small, one-year project that explored the movement of people, currencies and mobile phone signals across the border (and by the same company, Digicel, who radically transformed the Jamaican telecommunications market in the first half of the decade). Five days later, on January 12, 2010, the 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti.

Within days of the earthquake I received an email from an administrator at UC Irvine asking if we still planned to go to Haiti. Since our start date was still a few months away, we saw no reason to cancel our project but recognized that it would likely take on new dimensions as the daily life of Haitians – even in the distant region we planned to work – were transformed by the event and its aftermath. As distant observers, it was impossible not to pay attention to the reports of aid sitting and waiting transport, the use of mobile phones to ‘text’ donations and the non-stop stories circulating via mainstream media, twitter and a range of other social media. Money, mobile phones and (im)mobility seemed to be front and center. A few months later (with additional support from IMTFI), we decided to team up with Espelencia Baptiste (Kalamazoo College), an anthropologist who was spending her sabbatical outside of Port-au-Prince, to begin to look more systematically at what was happening on the ground.

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On Community and Inequality in the Haitian Earthquake

[This is a guest post by Chelsey L. Kivland, and is part of our series Reflections on Haiti. Chelsey is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago.]

January 12, 2010 was a beautiful day. It had been the fourth day in a series of such beautiful days, sunny but not too hot with a cool breeze that gained strength in the evenings, ensuring a set of restful nights. Early that morning, I left the house I shared with a friend and fellow anthropologist and a Haitian couple in the middle-class neighborhood of Lalue, and made my way to Bel Air, an impoverished neighborhood in the center of Port-au-Prince. I had been visiting Bel Air for some four years now to study why their concentration of Carnival performance associations, known as bann a pye (literally, “bands on foot”), had gotten so involved in community politics. Since 2004, they had been attempting to transform their associations into recognized civic organizations in order to stake claims on the multiple agencies that performance governance in Haiti, from governmental ministries to NGOs. They characterized their demands for funds for their performances and for the various social projects they executed in the community as a means of holding those who govern accountable to the standards of respect and equality they sought in and by democracy. That morning I was headed to Bel Air because a group of ti bann, “small bands,” was holding a meeting in order to strategize a plan to get the mayor’s office to recognize them as real bands. This was the first of two such meetings I had scheduled that day, and the only one I would finish.

I was awaiting the second one when, at 4:53 PM, the earth started to shake. I was in the best of possible places—in an open courtyard with only the bright sky and some clouds overhead. I was seated at a round table in the back of an old, wooden, French colonial house that had been converted into the mayor’s cultural offices and an outdoor restaurant and performance space that hosted weekend concerts. Claude, the representative of the Federation of Bann a Pye, and I were awaiting the start of a planning session of the Carnival Committee. Unlike other days, when the committee met around a wooden table inside the house, everyone gathered outside today. From the looks of it, people just wanted to take advantage of the soft sunlight with a cool beer at the bar. Agreeing, the committee chair soon told us that we’d just meet outside today. But we did not hurry to gather the tables together. Claude and I continued to debate about whether or not the mayor’s office would be able to verify that the bands had actually performed the past Sunday, their first scheduled performance of the year. He was telling me how the office hadn’t followed through on their plan to send scouts to check on the bands when a train, or so I had first thought, passed under my feet. Within seconds, I locked eyes with Claude. As the vibrations intensified, voices began to fill the air: “Tremblement de Terre,” Earthquake! Earthquake!
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Reflections on Haiti…

It has been one year since a 7.0 magnitude earthquake decimated Haiti on January 12, 2010.  In the weeks after the original tremors, many if not all of us read, watched, and listened to reports of the aftershocks—seismic and social—that turned Haiti into one of the worst disasters on record.  On the anniversary of that tragic event, the SM team invited new contributors Heather Horst, Erin Taylor, Chelsey Kivland, and Laura Wagner to reflect on their time in Haiti and reactions to the earthquake.  The responses ranged from the first-hand accounts to meditations on structural challenges.  Over the course of the day, we will be posting these contributions.

Discipline and Wattle: Suffering Ch. 1

The first chapter of the book should draw a familiar contrast with the introduction– little of the analytical language or conceptual erection (can I say that?) of the Intro is explicitly present in the first chapter of Part 1: “Governing Space”. I’m tempted to discipline Dr. Moore for his bad puns and subtitles, but that would involve pots and kettles and accusations, and I should refrain. This chapter by contrast is a great introductions to what is, as promised a complex tangle of people, places, histories, governments, sovereignties and disciplining. The frustration of trying to capture the social complexity of this place and time in an ethnography has already emerged in discussion… let me just reiterate some things. “Complexity is not its own virtue,” as Strong put it, gnarly or knot. And there is a double challenge here: first, to render the details, affect, experience and sense of a place using the relatively narrow tools of the ethnographic trade, i.e. the tools of the writer; second, to make the conceptual armature that is familiar to a broad range of scholars order and clarify the details that are otherwise available only to a narrow band of Zimbabwe specialists. Two kinds of complexity: the complexity of the novelist’s craft with rendering complex social life sensible and the complexity of the philosopher/social theorists craft of rendering conceptual schemes and empirical facts intelligible. In this respect, I think there is still a great deal to be said about “experimental” ethnography and the craft of writing one after the critiques of the 1980s–but only if this question is not divorced from the related goal of making conceptual schemes(Kerim implanted this term in my head– are you reading too much Davidson or something?) articulate with empirical description.

Chapter 1 almost achieves both, but I wouldn’t call it a complete success. It has a clever general structure and a lot of great detail (perhaps too much, indulging in places in obviously interesting but marginally relevant details of things like witchcraft or the rhetorical stylings of incompetent lesser headmen). There are two ways into the chapter, at least. One is through the author’s own “ethnographic emplacement” — the fact that as an anthropologist he had to find a (good) place to live, secure permission to live there, build his own hut and then, at the end of it all, found himself threatened with expulsion from that hut by the District Administrator — which in turn is the second way in, through the event of the District Administrator’s letter threatening residents with expulsion from Nyamatsupa if they do not conform to the plans for “villagization.” These two entry points–the author’s own experience with wattle, and the event of the DA’s disciplining letter–are explored in great detail, and are used to great effect as occasions to start laying out the complexity ethnographically. They do not explain, but they do start to map out settings, characters, events in history, and other crucial components of the story. Yet to emerge is a sense of how inquiry into this story has proceeded (what problems animate Moore’s search, other than his threatened hut) and a conceptual clarity (of the sort we hope will be provided via articulated assemblages and sovereignty-discipline-government).
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From “gay pirate criticism” to “queer bucaneer theory”

One of my fellow alumns told me years ago of the one of my undergraduate professor’s quip about the historical moment when, as he put it, what has once been “gay pirate criticism” turned into “queer bucaneer theory.” I’m not sure what he meant by this phrase, but to me its always been a nice way of encapsulating the historical shift from a somewhat nebulous interdisciplinarity (think “blurred genres”) to the birth of ‘theory’ as a consolidated thing that academics ‘did’ (think the “culture/power/history” reader). The transition — here somewhat spitefully dismissed as mere relabelling — definitely happened. But when? At what point did the confluence of philosophy, literary criticism, and social science become ‘theory’ in the sense embraced by some, and denounced by the detail-minded? It’s a question that has been on my mind as I think about the spring class on “contemporary anthropological theory” that I’m supposed to be teaching at my university.

But at last, my friends, the question has been answered, for I have discovered “Sodomy And The Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers In The Seventeenth-Century Caribbean”:http://www.nyupress.org/books/Sodomy_and_the_Pirate_Tradition-products_id-812.html.

Behold! In the mere hours since I have discovered this book at a used book sale, my entire intellectual landscape has been changed. There is actually a book on queer bucaneer theory — and one that is endorsed by Johnny Depp no less.

The original title of the hardcover edition (released in 1983) was Sodomy and the Perception of Evil but the paperback edition of 1984 was retitled Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition. This is, to my mind, definitive: ‘theory’ (at least of the queer bucaneer variety) began in 1984.