Indigenous Professional Development Workers in Haiti

Abstract

ABSTRACT Indigenous development professionals in southern Haiti occupy an intermediary position between actors and institutions of the international development industry and the rural peasant beneficiaries of development projects and programs. Educated and trained as agronomists or development technicians, these professionals facilitate the transmission of northern development standards and ideologies to southern subjectivities. By first situating Haitian development into greater post-structural understandings of how the global south is produced, these agents of globalization will be oriented as rural intellectuals in the Gramscian sense. In the rural communes surrounding the city of Les Cayes in southern rural Haiti, indigenous professionals have a place in the social field that characterizes localized development practice, which itself is located in larger regimes of power and representation that typify development processes around the world. These frequently urban-based professional agents carry western-based discourses surrounding modernity, secularism, and scientific capitalism to local peasant communities that are ideologically constructed as antitheses to these discourses. However, a case study of these processes demonstrates that the produced “truths” regarding aid and development are mediated and negotiated through social encounters between development intermediaries and aid recipients. This article concludes that localized development intermediaries represent new and important intellectual strata through which the peasantry engages global governance institutions.

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