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Fewer Men, More Babies re-evaluates the debate over family patterns
in the Caribbean with respect to the critical importance that child
labor plays in peasant household livelihood strategies. Earlier
anthropologists widely accepted and provided empirical evidence
that the contributions made by children to the peasant household
labor pool was a significant determinant of social patterns and
high birth rates. In the 1960s researchers began to dismiss the
economic utility of children. Children were conceptualized as
economic burdens, wanted for emotional, religious, and cultural
reasons. This ideational trend emerged in the context of changes in
Western economies and corresponding shifts in ideology; it
reflected agendas promoted and exported to the developing world by
aid agencies; and it derailed the refinement of academic models
that explain kinship and high fertility. This shortcoming is
especially evident in the Caribbean. Based on original ethnographic
research, this book demonstrates how the process unfolds in
contemporary rural Haiti; how intensive work regimes make children
necessary; how this necessity conditions sexual behavior, gender
relations, and kinship; and why, despite massive contraceptive
campaigns, birth rates in rural Haiti continue to be among the
highest in the world. Schwartz offers a solution to a demographic
paradox that some of the most prominent sociologists and
demographers of the 20th century noted but were never able to
explain: among impoverished small farmers, when more men are absent
due to male wage migration, the women remaining behind give birth
to more, not fewer, babies.
A significant and detailed contribution to the ethnological
literature on traditional life in the Caribbean, this book analyzes
peasant subsistence strategies in contemporary rural Haiti,
ultimately showing how intensive work regimes make children
necessary; how this necessity conditions sexual behavior, gender
relations, and kinship; and why, despite massive contraceptive
campaigns, birth rates in rural Haiti continue to be among the
highest in the world. Schwartz offers a solution to a demographic
paradox that some of the most prominent sociologists and
demographers of the 20th century noted but were never able to
explain: among impoverished small farmers, when more men are absent
due to male wage migration, the women remaining behind give birth
to more, not fewer, babies.
TRAVESTY is an anthropologist's personal story of working with
foreign aid agencies and discovering that fraud, greed, corruption,
apathy, and political agendas permeate the industry. It is a story
of failed agricultural, health and credit projects; violent
struggles for control over foreign aid; corrupt orphanage owners,
pastors, and missionaries; the nepotistic manipulation of research
funds; economically counterproductive food aid distribution
programs that undermine the Haitian agricultural economy;
disastrous social engineering by foreign governments, international
financial and development organizations--such as the World Bank and
USAID-- and the multinational corporate charities that have sprung
up in their service, CARE International, Catholic Relief Services,
World Vision, and the dozens of other massive charities that have
programs spread across the globe, moving in response not only to
disasters and need, but political agendas and economic opportunity.
TRAVESTY also chronicles the lives of Haitians and describes how
political disillusionment sometimes ignites explosive mob rage
among peasants frustrated with the foreign aid organizations,
governments and international agencies that fund them. TRAVESTY
recounts how some Haitians use whatever means possible try to
better their living standards, most recently drug trafficking, and
in doing so explains why at the service of international
narcotraffickers and Haitian money laundering elites, Haiti has
become a failed State. TRAVESTY reads like a novel. It takes the
reader from the bowels of foreign aid in the field; to the posh and
orderly urban headquarters of charities such as CARE International;
to the cold, distant heights of Capitol Hill policy planners. The
journey is marked by true accounts involving violence, corruption,
appalling greed, sexual exploitation, disastrous social
engineering, and the inside world of drug traffickers. But TRAVESTY
it is not a novel. It is founded on 15 years of academic and field
experience, research, and hard data. It entertains the reader with
vivid first hand accounts while treating seriously the problems
inherent not only in international aid, but the sabotaging effects
of the drug war on economic development in remote and impoverished
areas of the hemisphere.
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