Anfans Difisil: A Study of Imperiled Childhoods in Haiti

Haiti is the poorest and most volatile country in the Western Hemisphere and has the highest under-five mortality rate in the Americas, making it one of the most inhospitable places for a child to live. In fact, if there is any place in the world where children have no business growing up, it is in the Republic of Haiti. But grow up - and thrive, live and survive - they do. Half of the Haitian population is under the age of eighteen, many of them living and working under incredibly difficult circumstances marked by profound poverty and stark violence.Anfans Difisil foregrounds childhood as a crucial site of cultural, civil, and political relations, highlighting the many challenges that Haitian children face as they ply a living for themselves as street kids, child servants, gang soldiers, and prostitutes. Based on thirty years of fieldwork in Haiti, Kovats-Bernat constructs a vivid and revealing world of childhood lived under incredibly difficult circumstances. The book also provides an afterword detailing strategies for the conduct of ethnographic research in dangerous field environments like Haiti.