13616: Corbett: Review of Jennie Smith's: WHEN THE HANDS ARE MANY: COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN RURAL HAITI.

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

>From Bob Corbett

A nicer format of this review may be found at:

http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/personal/reading/smith-hands.html

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However, for those who prefer to read the review on-email it is below:

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WHEN THE HANDS ARE MANY: COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN RURAL
HAITI
By Jennie M. Smith
229 pages
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
ISBN # 0-8014-37970-0.

Comments of Bob Corbett
October 2002

Many visitors to Haiti encounter levels of poverty, need and material
suffering beyond anything they have ever known and are moved to help. But
what does it mean to help Haiti or Haitians? A lot depends upon how one
understands the origin and nature of this undeniable need and this misery.

Some understand it as a spiritual need and attempt to bring foreign
religions and different life goals to Haiti. Others see it as immediate
material need in the face of a hopeless political morass and attempt to
provide immediate relief in food, orphanages, medical care, foreign
controlled projects to dig wells, run clinics, school and agricultural
improvements. Others, less pessimistic about the possibility of Haitians
to change their own reality, try to aid Haitian community organizations to
advance themselves and their ability to impact both national and local
politics as well as improve the material conditions of the local area if
not the nation itself.

Many such foreign folks, individuals and organizations alike seem to be
sincere and decently motivated. Thus a great deal rests upon the analysis
of the Haitian situation in order for them to act rationally and to
positively impact the nation. Far too many foreign groups and individuals
develop an easy pessimism regarding Haitians. They see a mass of people
illiterate and under skilled, kept in misery by an elite class and greedy
political leadership and thus arrive at a view that any useful actions
rest upon their own foreign shoulders, and they go in to do good.

The primary quarrels I have with such views are not concerning the
desperate material needs, not even the motivation of most of the
outsiders. Rather, I suspect their analyses of the internal situation of
Haiti are lacking and flow from an oversimplified and non-historic
understanding.

Jennie Smiths book is an enlightening vehicle in challenging such
oversimplified views of Haitian rural communal social structures. It is
Smiths thesis that there is a long history of various communal
organizations which have functioned as they could to aid and protect needy
members and further, that more recent movements have added an overtly
political nature to such community organizations, helping the peasantry in
developing more political and legal sensibilities and desires to enter the
political arena in their own behalf.

Smith is no utopian. She sees the limits of such groups and knows the
resistance and obstacles. Nonetheless, she provides us with a clearer
picture of the reality which strongly suggests alternative paths for
external sympathetic aid than merely following more traditional paths of
basic charity or foreign controlled development.

This review congratulates and celebrates Smiths field work in revealing
the complex existing role or rural community organizations in modern
movements toward change, but raises questions about just how hopeful these
organizations are or can be in reversing the traditional structures of
power, privilege and misery in Haiti.

Jennie Smith lived and worked in the Grand Anse, the tip of the southern
peninsula. She was an observer presenting herself as such, and wandered
from place to place to see the various form of social organization and
discussing them with participants, as well as joining in them herself,
albeit primarily as an observer.

She focuses on several aspects of rural social organization beginning with
a fascinating recounting of several aspects of the use of music as a
vehicle for expressing criticism and discontent  the chante pwen-s
criticism couched in songs.

There are also detailed analyses of cooperative labor projects, including
the well-known kombit and kove. She shows how atribisyon groups are
membership clubs organized to share work responsibilities, but also to
provide some insurance to members for the hard times that come with
sickness, injury, death and old age and other especially hard times.

The sosyete is another ancient system for providing social protections in
a world where government does not do so, thus group membership can provide
not only aid, but a sense of unity and identity within the community.

In more recent years, since the 1960s, a new and numerous set of social
organizations, the ti legliz and tet ansannm have grown up with the
distinct roots in Latin American liberation theology (which surprisingly
Smith does not mention) and deep roots connected to the theoretical work
of Paulo Freiere (whom she does discuss). There are long sections in which
she reports the activities of these groups in the Grand Anse, discussing
their strengths and hopes while not neglecting to point out that like
virtually all human institutions they dont quite live up to their utopian
ideals.

One of the things I enjoyed most about Smiths analyses is that when
reporting on Haitian rural peasant organizations she did not idealize them
but described them as she found them, discussed the formal structure of
each form or organization in detail, but recognized and acknowledged in
each case where they fell short of the ideal which each did.

I believe it was only in her last chapter that Jennie Smith tended toward
a certain utopianism, but his was not in regard to Haitian rural social
organizations, but when she shifts to lecture northern-western
organizations on their behavior. Here her standards shift and I no longer
saw the patient and understanding observer, but the utopian moralist
preaching salvation to the evil folks.

Smith calls for a level of change in northern-westerns which are much like
saints in the desert calling for sinners to not merely mend their way but
become saints themselves. I dont criticize Smith for such arguments, I
often talk that way myself. However, I think we must all face the strong
likelihood that the fundamental structure of international relations will
remain significantly non-ideal and the structure of community
organizations in Haiti will too (Smith seems fully ready to accept this
latter).

However, if Smiths call for near saintly behavior from the international
relief and development sector is not likely to be followed, is there any
hope at all? Are Haitians (urban and rural masses alike) condemned to more
generations of the misery?

This observer sees little hope. Smith herself has focused on three sources
of negative influences:

1.  The failure of rural social organizations themselves to live up to or
even fully understand their own stated ideals.

2. The failure of the Haitian government to effect the promised revolution
(1990) from government in the benefit of the few, toward a government
seeking the welfare of all.

3.Not only the failure of the international community to HELP Haiti, but
the growing tendency of the new global market economy to even further
marginalize Haiti.

The prospects for hope seem dismal to me. I dont think Jennie Smiths book
is or can be any magic formula for reversing these negative trends and
bringing utopia to Haiti (or even significant improvement). But Smith is
in the tradition of serious academics doing their work well and with care.
She clears away misconceptions and brings us more into the clearing of
what is a fundamental starting point for re-thinking the history, nature
and place of rural community organizations in Haiti.