"Haitian Culture in the Informational Economies of Humanitarian Aid" in The Haiti Exception: Anthropology and the Predicament of Narrative, ed. Benedicty-Kokken, Byron, Glover, Schuller (original) (raw)

This chapter compares Haitian activist and international organizations' models of communication in a post-disaster moment. I begin by reflecting on my personal experience as a foreign academic and would-be aid volunteer/activist in Port-au-Prince in the year following the January 2010 earthquake. The chapter begins with my involvement in a housing rights activist coalition that staged "manifestations culturelles" to mobilize internally displaced persons and inform them of their basic rights to housing under the Haitian constitution. The chapter compares this model of information dissemination, organized in various tent cities as part of the educational and activist aims of the housing rights coalition, to similar cultural and educational programs produced by international aid organizations and performed in some of the same tent camps. Contrary to the Coalition's emphasis on education and the promotion of civic knowledge among Haitians, and especially the Haitian poor, as critical to altering the dire conditions in Haiti's tent cities, international organizations' counseled tent-camp residents to remain docile, patient, and to trust that international authorities are there to help. In the case of the international organizations, tent camp residents were often treated to PSA films that counseled skepticism (regarding information not originating in a "trusted source," i.e., the "authorities," or the international organizations themselves), and the power of volunteerism, personal responsibility and entrepreneurialism to address the problems faced day-to-day in the camps: a lack of tarps and tents; inadequate and unclean water; joblessness, etc. Further, such, PSA films tended to target Haiti's youth and younger generations, those who possess class aspirations, by including youthful characters (like "Ti-Joel"), a rational child who energetically disseminates through word of mouth "life-saving" information about cholera prevention. He heroically communications this information to backwards, impoverished and illiterate older subjects, who are engaged in traditional and "dangerous" activities, like the informal economic (and highly "unsanitary") exchanges of street food and the practice of vodou. In addition, older generations of Haitian middle-class men, despite their class position, are represented in other PSA films, as equally dangerous as their working class counterparts: their refusal to engage in new forms of communication (rational debate; waiting for "good information" from authorities before making a decision) and their belief in fact not-so-"outlandish" conspiracy theories and rumors (which aren't very outlandish at all), their regular attempts to show parallels between the present and the past in Haitian history, and finally their mistrust of "white" authorities, must be swiftly disciplined and defused. Family members and friends take on this "work" by telling these "difficult old men," that they should "shut up," since their irrationality and irritability disrupt the groups' otherwise smooth processing of information "input" and their determining of the proper "output" for the situation. This chapter ultimately shows, then, how humanitarian organizations working in Haiti in 2010 and following relied as much on media technologies, like radio and cell phones, as they did on Haitian "teledjol" or word of mouth. As such, Haitians themselves were marshaled into the systems of governmentality of the post-Earthquake period that accompanied other more overt forms of crowd control; they thus provided immaterial (and thus un-remunerated) forms of labor necessary to maintaining social control and dominance over the increasingly restless population of 1.5 million displaced people.