Genetically Modified Organizations? Understanding & Supporting Civil Society in Urban Haiti

Abstract

Haiti's January 12, 2010 earthquake exposed consequences of centuries of underdevelopment, inequality, and exclusion, both within country and between Haiti and rest of world. Images of earthquake, each more horrible than next, circulated on Internet and in traditional media. According to Gina Athena Ulysse (2010), these images reinscribed Haiti as bete noir (black sheep) of Caribbean. In weeks after quake, mainstream media showed images of riots, fighting, violence, and gangs engaged in turf warfare for control of rubble. Working to circumscribe knowledge of existing civil society institutions, these media representations - influenced by centuries of postcolonial racial anxiety concerning world's first free black republic - depicted crowded and unruly capital, Republic of Potoprens, segments of which were deemed the most dangerous place on Earth (Leth and Loncarevic, 2006).1 As a result of such images circulating in media and policy circles, humanitarian agencies approached Haiti's urban locations as tena nullius ·, a place without law or institutions, and justified a militarized and instrumentalized response (Vorbe, 2011). These media images denigrate or negate urban civil society and render official response to earthquake more difficult. The pervasiveness of these images necessitates a correction to erasure of Haitian civil society. As many researchers have documented (e.g., G ab aud , 2 0 0 0 ; Smit h , 2 0 0 1 ,there are vibrant colle et i ve ci vi e org ani ? at ion s in countryside, which are in all respects, DNA of Haitian public life. Despite powerful discourses that declared life in Potoprens to be violent and anonymous after earthquake, this article argues that civil society continued to exist, however in a genetically modified form as it adapted to managerial regimes of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and creation of resident committees in approximately 800 camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs). My research, which finds that Haitian civil society remains a vital force in country, should encourage a revaluation of aid policy, particularly as it pertains to relationship between NGOs and those in IDP camps, especially since official aid for IDP camps is currently expiring. RESEARCH METHODS I have been studying NGOs and their relationship with recipients and donors - what I call civic infrastructure (see Schuller, 2006) - during a decade of anthropological engagement with Haiti, including a long-term ethnography comparing two Haitian women's NGOs (see Schuller, 2012). In addition to this long-term engagement that enabled me to notice and theorize forms of civil society that donors and NGOs tended to miss, this article draws on both qualitative and quantitative data collected in summers of 2009, 2010, and 2011 with aid of over two dozen research assistants from Universite d'Etat d'Haiti and City University of New York (Table 1). The research in 2009 involved a social mapping of four urban neighborhoods, two (low-income) and two mixed-income neighborhoods. The research in 2010 consisted of a multi-pronged survey of a random sample of 108 camps for Haiti's internally displaced; data for this article were from interviews from residents and camp committee members. In 2011, I conducted was a five-week ethnography of eight camps that included a survey of 800 households, and semi-structured interviews with 80 camp residents. Data for this article focuses on questions pertaining to civic infrastructure, interrelated spheres of relationships surrounding a given social entity, including NGOs, neighborhood associations, and camp committees. As with all quantitative research, numbers cannot speak for themselves. Providing necessary context, and indeed vital information that would have otherwise been overlooked or even unavailable, this research benefits from my long-term relationships with a range of popular associations in Potoprens. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.