

#  Sex, Family & Fertility in Haiti

Volume 2

## by

## Timothy T. Schwartz

##

## *****

Sex, Family and Fertility in Haiti, Volume 2

First published in Hardback in 2008 by Lexington Books as,

"Fewer Men, More Babies: Sex, family and fertility in Haiti.

All Rights Reserved.

Scholars, students, and critics may use excerpts as long as they cite the source.

2nd Edition published January 2011

ISBN 10 146812966X

ISBN 13 9781468129663

# Contents

Sex, Family & Fertility in Haiti 1

by 1

Timothy T. Schwartz 1

***** 1

Chapter 12 8

Gender- and Age-Based Divisions of Labor 8

Introduction 8

Gender-Based Division of Labor 9

 Table 12.1: Adult sexual division of labor (N = 1,482) 10

Age-Based Division of Labor 10

Who Cares for the Animals 12

 Figure 12.1: First response question:"Who takes care of the animals?" 12

 Figure 12.2: Second response question:"Who takes care of the animals?" 12

Who Carries the Water 13

 Figure 12.3: First Response to Question"Who Carries Water?" 13

 Figure 12.4: Second Response to Question "Who Carries Water?" 13

 Relationship between Number of Children and Household Prosperity 14

 Figure 12.5: Animals by children per household 14

 Figure 12.6: Gardens by children per household (n = 106; children seven- to twenty-five years of age) 15

 Table 12.3: Number of children resident in house by whether or not woman is engaged in marketing (n = 132; children seven to twenty-five years of age) 15

***** 16

 Statistical Results for Test of the Number of Household Gardens by the Number of Seven- to Twenty-Five-Year-Olds Controlling for Age of the Head of the Household 16

 Table 12.4: Gardens by the number of seven- to twenty-five-year-olds controlling for age of the head of the household: R-square 16

 Table 12.5: Gardens by the number of seven- to twenty-five-year-olds controlling for age of the head of the household: ANOVA 16

 Table 12.6: Gardens by the number of seven- to twenty-five-year-olds controlling for age of the head of the household: coefficients 16

***** 17

 Statistical Results for Test of the Number of Household Animals by the Number of Seven- to Twenty-Five-Year-Olds, Controlling for Age of the Head of the Household 17

 Table 12.7: Animals by the number of seven- to twenty-five-year-olds, controlling for age of the head of the household: R-square 17

 Table 12.8: Animals by the number of seven- to twenty-five-year-olds controlling for age of the head of the household: ANOVA 17

 Table 12.9: Animals by the number of seven- to twenty-five-year-olds, controlling for age of the head of the household: Coefficients 17

***** 18

 Table 12.10: Gardens by the number of seven to twenty-five years olds by household head age categories 18

 Table 12.11: Animals by the number of seven to twenty-five year olds by household head age categories 18

Conclusion 19

***** 19

Notes 19

 Table 12.12: Child present in house by number of gardens, model summary (Baseline Survey) 21

 Table 12.13: Child present in house by number of gardens, ANOVA (Baseline Survey) 21

 Table 12.14: Child Present in House by Number of Gardens, Coefficients (Baseline Survey) 21

***** 21

Chapter 13 22

 What Parents Have to Say about the Economic Utility of Children 22

Introduction 22

What Farmers Have to Say about Children 22

Number of Children Desired 25

 Table 13.1: Preferred number of children by age and sex of respondent 26

 Sons vs. Daughters and Mothers vs. Fathers 28

 Table 13.2: Reasons fathers gave for preferring daughters 28

 Table 13.3: Male and female, daughters vs. sons 29

 Table 13.4: Sex of child who is hosting resident parent (N = 1,521) 30

Conclusion 30

***** 31

Notes 31

***** 34

Chapter 14 34

 Raising Children and Control Over Child Labor Activities 34

Introduction 34

Birth 35

The Costs of Rearing Children 35

Paternity 35

The Working Child 37

The Parental Contract 37

Godparents and their Rights and Duties 38

Friends, Relatives, and Restaveks 40

 Table 14.1: Child residence patterns: Relationship of child household members to head of household (Missing = 86; children under nineteen years of age) 40

 Table 14.2: Unrelated children in the house 40

Children, Work, and the Whip 42

Conclusion 43

***** 43

Notes 43

Chapter 15 46

 Conjugal Union and the Formation of the Household 46

Introduction 46

The Definition of a Child 46

The Conjugal Contract 47

 Table 15.1: Marriage vs. consensual union (age >15; N=4,927) 47

Legal Marriage vs. Plasaj 47

Case #1: Francois Bon-Homme 48

House Building and Ownership 49

Case # 2: Ti Frè and Lizanne 49

Case # 3: Marco and Selest 50

Case # 4: Selikè and Marlene 51

The Familial Contract 51

Table 15.2: Residence patterns 51

Case #5: Renaud and Yoland 52

***** 53

Notes 53

***** 54

Chapter 16 55

 Polygyny, Progeny, and Production Introduction 55

 Another Misrepresentation of Social Life in Rural Haiti: Female Repression 55

Definition of Polygyny 56

Frequency of polygyny 57

Table 16.1: Polygyny: Opinion Survey 57

 Table 16.2: Male age groups by ever been polygynous 57

The Economic Underpinnings of Polygyny 57

 Table 16.3: Male high income groups by ever been polygynous 58

Female Interest in Male Wealth 58

Economic Independence 59

 Table 16.4: Polygynous males by the amount of "fat" and irrigated land owned 60

Male Attitudes toward Polygyny 60

 Table 16.5: Men who have ever been polygynous by men who have left their first wife (missing = 16) 61

Female Attitudes toward Polygyny 61

 Table 16.6: A man takes a second wife, what should the first wife do (missing male responses=15—see text) 62

 Table 16.7: A man takes a second wife, may first wife be unfaithful (missing male responses=15) 62

The Need for a Wife 63

 Table 16.8: Who needs the other more, husband or wife? 63

 Table 16.9: Could you live without your spouse? 64

 Table 16.10: Why men versus women chose their spouse (missing=4) 64

The Bargaining Stick: Paternity 64

 The Econo-Demographic Underpinnings of Polygyny 66

 Table 16.11: Women vs. men in union per five-year age group 67

Reproductive Reluctance and the Matriarch 68

 Table 16.12: Women who have gardens by number of children 68

 The Matriarchic Market Woman and Grandchildren 70

 Table 16.13: Union type by household residents under thirty years old (but over fourteen) who are not the head or spouse of head 70

 Figure 16.1: Children under thirty years old (but over fourteen), who have children of their own but still living in parent's household (N = 2,135) 72

Conclusion 73

**** 74

Notes 74

 Table 16.14: Ever-polygynous men in Kinanbwa Haiti 78

***** 81

Chapter 17 82

Caribbean Family Patterns 82

Introduction 82

Dysfunctional Family Patterns 82

 History: The Plantation Economy and the All-Important Household 84

Male Wage Migration 85

 Table 17.1: Sex Ratios Commonwealth Caribbean Islands 1881–1960 86

 Matrifocality and the Myth of the Female Bread Winner 87

The Caribbean Father 90

 Figure 17.1: Plot of female household heads by sex ratios (Legend: A = 1 observation; B = 2 observations; N = 15) 91

 Table 17.2: Analysis of variance for "female-headed household by sex-ratios" using Otterbein's (1965: 75) Caribbean data 91

 Table 17.3: Analysis of variance "female-headed household by sex-ratio" using Yves Charbit (1984: 32) and adding widowhood ratio from Massiah (1983:19) 91

 Autonomous Caribbean Households Controlled by Women and the Importance of Children 92

Beating the Hell out of Children 93

Older Women 93

Why Men Cooperated 95

Conclusion 95

***** 96

Notes 96

 Table 17.4: Percentage of household income from males: Male- vs. female-headed households 97

***** 97

Chapter 18 98

Fewer Men, More Babies 98

Introduction 98

 Proximate and Intermediate Determinants of Fertility 98

Fewer Men, More Babies 99

Conclusion 102

***** 104

Notes 104

 Table 18.1: Caribbean net migration by total fertility rate 105

 Table 18.2: Correlations in average change in total fertility rate by net migration 106

Chapter 19 108

 A Reflexive and Critical Look at the Anthropology of the Caribbean 108

Introduction 108

Historical Particularism and Civil Rights 109

 Structural Functionalism and Colonial Government Morality Campaigns 110

Post Functional-Structuralist Era 110

Feminists 111

Contraceptive Campaigns 113

Child Labor Campaign 114

Other Value Campaigns and Agendas 117

 The Impact of Value Campaigns on Informants 118

 Interviewer: What quantity of children is best to have? 118

Conclusion 120

***** 121

Notes 121

******************* 121

Works Cited 123

# Chapter 12

#  Gender- and Age-Based Divisions of Labor

## Introduction

In meeting the demands associated with maintaining a Jean Rabel household there is a sexual and age division of labor. Men perform tasks associated with gardening and livestock and women tend to focus on household chores such as cooking, carrying water, and marketing. Women are the focal point of households; they are thought of as the managers and they are more likely than men to cross the gender lines and perform tasks that fall in the sphere of men, particularly with regard to agriculture. Children are major contributors to household labor demands, particularly with regard to retrieving water and cooking fuel, and Jean Rabeliens recognize and emphasize the role that children play in assuring the survival of the household. Indeed, children and their contributions are so important to survival that, as will be seen, the drive to produce large numbers of offspring in order to meet domestic labor demands largely determines the structural organization of the Jean Rabel family, patterns of conjugal union, and the sociocultural fertility complex discussed earlier.

##  Gender-Based Division of Labor

Labor within the household is divided in such a way that the members of one gender depend on members of the other gender in a type of socially constructed symbiosis that makes life difficult for the lone woman and nearly impossible for the lone man. For example, when asked if they could live without a spouse, 119 of 136 respondents (87.5%) replied "no," with comments such as:

_No. We need each other. The man plants gardens and the woman, it is she who must harvest what the man plants. It is the woman who must sell the harvest too. It is the woman too who must wash clothes._ 1 (thirty-seven-year-old father of three)

_I can't do it because if I need a garden, it is my husband who must get to work. If I build a house, it is my husband who does it for me. You see, we need each other_.2 (forty-year-old mother of five)

_I cannot live without a woman. There are several circumstances, problems that women resolve. I cannot enter into some affairs. I cannot whip up a meal. I cannot wash clothes._ 3 (thirty-eight-year-old father of seven)

_No. One enters into the other. Water enters into the sugar. Sugar enters into the water. You cannot throw out just the water. They are a single mixture._ 4 (thirty-eight-year old father of seventeen)

Women take care of the house, clean, wash clothes, make meals, carry water, and purchase basic foods and necessities at the market. As shown earlier, women also sell garden produce, they sell staples out of the house, and they often work as itinerant traders who extend household revenues by rolling cash reserves over in retail marketing ventures. A woman with a husband who is present will typically not participate in preparing fields or weeding, but women are considered indispensable in planting and, more importantly, for the daily picking of produce and seasonal harvests. Indeed, harvesting is considered to be the exclusive domain of women and is typically coordinated by the ranking woman of the house. Men who do not have a wife will rely on their mother, sister, or a daughter to harvest and sell produce.

##  Table 12.1: Adult sexual division of labor (N = 1,482)

Men work in the gardens, care for livestock, make charcoal for sale to villages, towns, and cities, and gather firewood for their own households. The heaviest tasks, like hoeing (voye wou) and digging holes for plantain trees (voye pikwa/fouye twou) are considered to be men's work while light garden work, such as covering holes and collecting the debris from a weeded garden, are thought of as women's work. Men help process the food, such as flaying millet, beans, and corn or pulverizing the seeds with bat and bucket-size mortar and pestle. Men build houses, and all jobs involved in the building of a house, such as carpentry and masonry, are male jobs. The only task related to household construction that women do is plaster houses with white mud or lime—if the mud is not white then plastering house walls is men's work. As seen earlier, men, and to a far lesser extent women, migrate to the city in pursuit of temporary wage opportunities.

Perhaps the most significant and telling feature of the gender division of labor, and a point that will also be important later in understanding marriage patterns, is that men rarely engage in female chores while women can and sometimes do perform the full range of male activities. Men do not wash clothes, make meals, clean the house, or go to the market. Men seldom carry water. Women on the other hand can and often do tend livestock, weed gardens, and search for firewood. Some women, particularly older, economically independent women, hoe the soil and, in a few rare instances, dig holes for plantain trees. This versatility in job performance reflects the fact that women are more important than men in the day-to-day functioning of homesteads. Indeed, households are thought of as belonging to women and, as discussed in a later chapter, Jean Rabeliens are fond of saying, "men don't have houses" (gason pa gen kay), and people will typically refer to the homestead, even when a productive male is present, as belonging to the woman, as in "Ma Benita's place" or "Lili's house."

##  Age-Based Division of Labor

While men and women clearly report needing each other to survive, they report needing children even more. In the Opinion Survey there were 10.8 percent more respondents who said they could not live without children than those who said they could not live without a spouse (97.0% vs. 86.2%). Typical comments included:

_Oh, you must have children. If you don't have any you are in bad shape. You have too much to do._ 5 (fifty-four-year-old mother of six)

_That is the biggest illness. I can't do it. I just can't live without_ children.6 (sixty-two-year-old father of eleven)

_No. I can't live without children. . . . It's them that work, that give me water, fetch wood, make food_.7 (sixty-two-year-old father of fifteen)

_No. You can't do it. You need children. You need children. You understand? You need children to help you_.8 (fifty-four-year-old father of ten)

_No. Children are everything in a household_.9 (twenty-six-year-old mother of three)

Children of both sexes participate in every type of labor activity (see table 12.2).10 In over 70 percent of households visited—including households with only toddlers or infants—children (primarily girls) carry water, cook, and perform housework. In over 50 percent of households, children (primarily boys) reportedly help in the garden and with livestock; in some 32 percent of households, girls, boys, or both, market produce; and in over 30 percent of households, children (mostly girls) sell livestock.

Table 12.2: Child sexual division of labor (N = 1,482)

##

##  Who Cares for the Animals

##  Figure 12.1: First response question:"Who takes care of the animals?"

##  Figure 12.2: Second response question:"Who takes care of the animals?"

## Who Carries the Water

##  Figure 12.3: First Response to Question"Who Carries Water?"

##  Figure 12.4: Second Response to Question "Who Carries Water?"

##  Relationship between Number of Children and Household Prosperity

As discussed previously, all people in the region, regardless of their poverty, have access to garden plots and animals through sharecropping and other tenure arrangements, something that makes the capacity to tend animals and gardens a significant factor in determining the actual number of each managed by a household. Capacity is determined by the availability of domestic labor. That means children.

The extent to which the number of children contribute to household productivity is evident in the relationship between the number of children living in a house and the number of gardens and animals belonging to households.11 The Livestock and Gardens Survey, discussed in chapter 1, was designed to measure the relationship. I compared actual number of children sleeping full time in the household with the number of animals and gardens that belong to the household.12

Excluding the heads of households and their spouses, the number of seven- to twenty-five-year-olds present in the household was found to explain fully 32.6 percent of the variance in ownership of animals and 33.1 percent of the variance in the number of gardens planted (see figures 12.5 and 12.6). This relationship was expected to be a byproduct of the age of the household head. But when age of the household head was statistically controlled by adding it to the regression equation, the model still explained 32.0 percent of the variance in number of household gardens and 20.0 percent of the variance in number of household animals (see tables 12.4 thru 12.9).

The number of children present in a house is also a major factor in determining the likelihood that the principal woman of the household will be engaged in marketing activities. Controlling for age, a woman with more than four children is three to eight times more likely to be engaged in commercial activity than a woman with zero to three children.

##  Figure 12.5: Animals by children per household

(children = 106; seven- to twenty-five years of age)

##  Figure 12.6: Gardens by children per household (n = 106; children seven- to twenty-five years of age)

##  Table 12.3: Number of children resident in house by whether or not woman is engaged in marketing (n = 132; children seven to twenty-five years of age)

##

## *****

##  Statistical Results for Test of the Number of Household Gardens by the Number of Seven- to Twenty-Five-Year-Olds Controlling for Age of the Head of the Household

##  Table 12.4: Gardens by the number of seven- to twenty-five-year-olds controlling for age of the head of the household: R-square

##  Table 12.5: Gardens by the number of seven- to twenty-five-year-olds controlling for age of the head of the household: ANOVA

.

##  Table 12.6: Gardens by the number of seven- to twenty-five-year-olds controlling for age of the head of the household: coefficients

## *****

##  Statistical Results for Test of the Number of Household Animals by the Number of Seven- to Twenty-Five-Year-Olds, Controlling for Age of the Head of the Household

##  Table 12.7: Animals by the number of seven- to twenty-five-year-olds, controlling for age of the head of the household: R-square

##  Table 12.8: Animals by the number of seven- to twenty-five-year-olds controlling for age of the head of the household: ANOVA

##  Table 12.9: Animals by the number of seven- to twenty-five-year-olds, controlling for age of the head of the household: Coefficients

##

## *****

##

##  Table 12.10: Gardens by the number of seven to twenty-five years olds by household head age categories

##  Table 12.11: Animals by the number of seven to twenty-five year olds by household head age categories

## Conclusion

The value of child labor is evident in the correlations between the quantity of household livestock and gardens and the number of children resident in a particular household. Although, as shown, children participate in virtually all household and productive activities, the increased number of livestock and gardens may not be so much a result of children directly participating, as the result of contributions children make by carrying out small, time-consuming tasks such as fetching water, cooking, cleaning, and tending animals, contributions that free adults to focus on productive income generating activities such as gardening and commerce.

But none of this unequivocally demonstrates that children are a net asset to household livelihood. It is unlikely, given the data, that households with greater numbers of children are more impoverished than households with fewer children. However, the argument could just as easily be made that more children simply increases the demand for food and additional income, translating to the need for more gardens, more animals tended, and more wage-labor and market ventures. Thus, the question is, do children increase household prosperity? And very importantly, how are those contributions related to high fertility, the pronatal sociocultural fertility complex and particular values associated with Jean Rabel's sexual moral economy? These issues are the subject of the following chapter.

## *****

## Notes

1. Non. Nou toudè bezwenn lòt. Si gason ap travay, fi a menm se li pou ranmase rekolt ki gason ap fet. Rekolt ki fet la tou, se fi a menm ki pou al van ni. Se fi a tou pou al lave.

2. M pa kapab paskè si m bezwenn nan jaden an, se mari-m pou al travay. Si m-ap monte yon kay la , se mari mwen pou fe pou mwen. Ou we yon bezwenn lòt.

3. M pa ka viv san fi. Sa-k pase m pa ka viv san fi, gen yon seri de sikonstans, pwoblem se fi pou fe, paskè se pa tout bagay m ka antre andan. Ma pa ka nan fe ti manje rapid, m pa ka lave.

4. Non. Yon antre nan lòt. Dlo antre nan sik la. Sik antre nan dlo a. Sa di, ou pa ka jete dlo a. Sa di, se yon dosaj fet.

5. O, fo ou gen ti moun. Si ou pa genyen ou pa bon. Ou anbarase twop. Kounye-la m vin pran dlo la, oswa m sot nan jaden lè m rive se mwen pou mete ponyet atè, se mwen pou al nan dlo. Lè m vini, pou al nan bwa.

6. Pi gwo maladi, m pa kapab. . . . Telman m pa ka viv san ti moun.

7. Non. M pa ka viv san ti moun. Bondieu ba-m pitit la, se li ki bay ou travay, ki ba-m ti dlo, chèche ti bwa, vin fe manje.

8. Non. Ou pa kapab. Paske ou bezwenn ti moun, ou bezwenn ti moun, ou konprann. Ou bezwenn pou ti moun yo ed-o.

9. Non. Ti moun se tout eleman andedan kay.

10. Only 5.4 percent of households (85 of the 1,523 reporting) had no children—compared to 12 percent of households with no adult woman present full time and 23 percent of households with no adult male present full time. Fifty-seven percent of these childless households (forty-seven of eighty-three for which the data is available) were in yards with other houses that do have children indicating that only 36 of 1,523 houses (2.4% of the total) are actually homesteads having no children. Only seven of these latter households had a woman as household head.

11. There are obviously other factors that also determine the number of gardens and animals a household may own, specifically wealth. Differential access to land and capital and other sources of revenue such as remittances and money earned through skilled craftsmanship and marketing are clearly determinant of the number of animals and gardens a person can purchase. The periodic sale of animals and garden land to cover medical expenses and costs associated with funeral and wedding ceremonies are also prominent factors determining the number of animals and gardens a household might have at any given time. But the point regarding children and prevailing social and economic conditions in Jean Rabel is that they provide the next most important ingredient, the labor to manage gardens and animals.

12. The Baseline Survey included the same data needed to test the relationship between the number of children present in the household and the number of animals and gardens the household tended. The relationship is significant, even when controlling for age of the household head—which has no statistical influence—but as described in chapter 1, it was discovered too late that respondents in the Baseline Survey were tending to include in their enumeration of household members children who were away at school in the village or in the city. Because of drought conditions, there was also a problem with reporting on the number of animals. To address these shortcomings, the smaller survey used here was carried out in two Jean Rabel communities. This survey, called the Livestock and Gardens Survey, was conducted by a supervisor from the Baseline Survey (see the introduction).

Below are data from the Baseline Survey regarding the number of children reported as present in the household versus number of gardens and controlling for age of the household head. (The ages five to nineteen years was used in this test rather than the seven- to twenty-five-year-old range used in the other test. The decision was arbitrary.)

##  Table 12.12: Child present in house by number of gardens, model summary (Baseline Survey)

##  Table 12.13: Child present in house by number of gardens, ANOVA (Baseline Survey)

##  Table 12.14: Child Present in House by Number of Gardens, Coefficients (Baseline Survey)

##

## *****

# Chapter 13

#  What Parents Have to Say about the Economic Utility of Children

## Introduction

In the previous chapter it was shown that children are important contributors to the labor-intensive household livelihood strategies that prevail in Jean Rabel. Children do household chores, they cook, they clean, they go for water and to market, they work in the garden, and they tend livestock. More children appear to translate into greater economic security and relatively greater household prosperity, i.e., more animals and more gardens, and greater resources to survive drought. The statistics may or may not convince the skeptical reader. However, in this chapter it will be seen that Jean Rabel farmers need no convincing. During the Opinion Survey, farmers overwhelmingly emphasized the fact that children are not just helpful, they are necessary; and they are necessary because they work.

##  What Farmers Have to Say about Children

The matter-of-fact explanation farming men and women in the Opinion Survey (N = 136) gave for producing children is simply because children are the single most important source of household labor. When asked "Why did you have children?" 76 percent of respondents made comments similar to the following examples:1

_Why does a person have children? To help. Right now for example, I would have to go get water. But I don't have to. It is here. I would have to go get wood. But I don't have to. It's right here._ 2 (forty-year-old mother of five)

_If I did not have them, things would be worse for me. You need a little water, they go to the water. You need a little fire wood, they go get wood. The boys work in the garden for you. They look after the animals_.3 (thirty-three-year-old mother of eight)

_Children are the biggest necessity. If you need something you tell a child. Like right now, I can say, "go look for some fire wood," or "some embers from the neighbor's house." "Go to the market."_ 4 (twenty-seven-year-old father of three)

_Why did I have children? I don't understand what you are saying. Children are there to help you. Your children do your work. I don't know who takes care of things at your house_.5 (sixty-year-old father of thirteen)

The need for children is conceptualized first and foremost not in terms of love, companionship, or the security that grown children can provide to aging parents; the need for children is conceptualized first in terms of labor. When asked if they could live without children, only 4 of the 136 respondents (3%), 2 women and 2 men, replied "yes," yet 14 percent of respondents said they could live without a spouse. Almost without exception and without hesitating, 97 percent of men and women replied to the question in the manners exhibited in the following examples:

If you don't have children, dogs will eat you. If you have no children to fetch a little water and get some fire for you. If you hurt something or you are sick, you're finished.6 (fifty-five-year-old father of seventeen)

_No. Children are protection. You need children to help you work. It is children who save the household_ 7 (thirty-two-year-old mother of five)

_Oh, a big never. Children don't tire. Children are animals. Children are never worn out. They do all the work. They go to the water. They do all the work_.8 (forty-year-old mother of four)

_No. I cannot live without children. . . . If I need one to go to the village, I send him. If I need one to go for wood, I send him. They can't tell me no . . . . Not one of them can stand in front of me and say no. We pull together._ 9 (thirty-nine-year-old father of six)

_Me! Times the way they are? Me! If I didn't have children I wouldn't stick around here for a minute. I would leave. I would go play a different lottery. I would go look for another type of work. The type of work where they would pay me money._ 10 (forty-year-old mother of five)

Only 7 percent of respondents indicated they wanted children for reasons of affection and only 14 percent indicated children were valuable foremost as adults (i.e., when the children are grown) to provide support during old age. This should not be interpreted to mean people in rural Jean Rabel do not love their children, nor should it be interpreted to mean that when their parents become aged, children are not at some level considered valuable sources of security. Farmers emphasized that children's support should be reciprocated; children "do" for adults and adults have a responsibility to "do" for the children.11 Interviewers regularly received comments like Yo itilite o. Ou pran reskonsab yo (They make themselves useful to you and you feed and care for them) and Ti moun ka ede-m. M ka ede ti moun yo (Children can help me. I can help children). Beyond feeding and clothing children, the most important thing adults can do for children is put them in school. School is the single greatest nonsubsistence expense for Jean Rabel households and the second biggest reason for selling livestock (see chapter 7). Also, to some extent, school is thought of as an investment in the future security of parents: 25 percent of parents said they sent their children to school primarily so the child could better care for them in the future.12

But the point that farmers made more emphatically than any other is that it is the work children perform in their youth rather than after they are grown that is foremost in importance. Thus, children are important to their parents as they age but not for the reasons outsiders tend to anticipate—that they will provide for their parents—but rather for the contributions they make to the household labor pool in their youth and for the grandchildren they will provide as they mature, grandchildren who will also run errands and do the time-consuming and labor-intensive chores necessary for survival in Jean Rabel. This fact came through most clearly in the question, "If you had not yet borne children, and someone came along and promised you $500 per month, every month, for your entire life, with the single condition that you do not bear/father children, would you agree?" Respondents had no problem understanding the question, nor did they have a problem answering. Only five women and eight men said "yes," they would take $500 a month (an enormous sum for the farmer) for life rather than bear children. The other 123 respondents (90%) responded with an emphatic "no." The variety of responses revealed the appreciation with which people in Jean Rabel regard their children, especially young children, and the logic underlying this appreciation. In the following comments, take particular note of the importance of children versus money; the limitations of money; and the emphasis on young, rather than grown, children who can be sent on errands:

_They give you $500 a month. OK. You are in the house by yourself. Fever takes you. And while you are sick, who is going to look after you?_ 13(forty-year-old father of three)

_No. I would not agree. That couldn't help you at all. If I am getting $500 a month and I do not have a child to say, go there, take this gallon, go get some water for me. Look at me, I'd be making $500 dollars a month and all the time things would be getting worse. Not better. No. Not better. Worse. Things would be getting worse._ 14 (fifty-one-year-old father of two)

_No. Children are worth more than money._ 15 (forty-year-old mother of three)

_No. Because it doesn't make sense. . . . I would rather have children. As the old people say, children are the wealth of the poor._ 16 (thirty-eight-year-old mother of seven)

_No. Because I need children. I can tell you, you have money in your hand and you can't send it to do a single errand. Sometimes you have money with you and you lose it._ 17 (fifty-year-old father of six)

_Why don't I agree? Something happens. I get to the house. I lie there. I'm sick. Money? I can't send it to do anything for me. I can die lying there on it. It's something that can't do anything for me. It is a person you need to take the money, go with it, buy what I need and bring it to me. And if I don't have any children to give the money to?_ 18 (fifty-six-year-old father of one)

_No. If I need a little water, money can't give it to me. I cannot send money on an errand_.19 (thirty-four-year-old mother of five)

_No. Because I know that if I had no child, tomorrow, by God, I am sick, I would not find a child to help me._ 20 (twenty-eight-year-old mother of two)

_Ah, you can have money in the house but if you do not have children to do for you? A person can have money and you can lie down and die. If you do not have a child to stand there and do things for you that money can not do. Money! You can sleep on a pile of money. It cannot work for you. It is people who stand up and work for you_.21 (sixty-five-year-old mother of nine)

_Oh. Children are wealth. If you don't have children, a dog is better than you. No. I would rather have children. Children are help. This morning, if you send one out there, he does his job, it's you who benefits._ 22 (fifty-four-year-old mother of six)

_I would not agree. Ahh, children. Money can't do anything for me. If I am sick, I need to take care of something, the children, if they are there, they will take care of it. If I am sick, I can't send money to do errands_.23 (forty-five-year-old mother of five)

_No. Why. Because children are the wealth of the poor. Children are wealth_.24 (fifty-year-old mother of four)

_Oh no. Children are wealth. It is children who are, who are the wealth of the poor. Money is not wealth._ 25 (forty-two-year-old mother of three)

_No. Because let's say you have money. You go find someone to do something for you. He doesn't do it. But children. As soon as I am sick, look at my child making food for me, washing clothes for me, doing things for me. And if it was money, it wouldn't be doing anything for me_.26 (thirty-year-old father of four)

_I would ask for the chance to have one child. I find children necessary_.27 (forty-year-old mother of three)

##  Number of Children Desired

Of the 1,361 women reporting in the nutritional part of the Baseline Survey, the average number of children desired was 3.5 (missing = 183). Of the 124 men and women who were willing to respond in the Opinion Survey (missing = 12), the average number was 3.9 children. These figures are consistent with similar results reported by farmers all over Haiti (Stycos 1954, Murray 1972, Allman 1982b, Smith 1998). But perhaps the question is not specific enough to provide a clear understanding of the decision-making process involved in determining the number of children desired. For example, farmers distinguished between how many children they want to be responsible for and how many they need, or would be useful to them. Some individuals expressed a preference for few or no children but then added that they had no choice, that they must have children, that children were necessary to assure a minimal standard of living. Elsewhere in Haiti there is evidence that five people—two adults and three children—is considered an ideal sized household (Murray 1972, Smith 1998). But this implies that the ideal number of "working" children is three, and it does not consider that children grow up and leave the house and must then be replaced by other children. Furthermore, when respondents in the Opinion Survey were asked how many children they would want if they had a paying job, the average went from 3.9 to 4.2 children.

There is another good reason to question the results. When asked, "How many children do you want?" farmers everywhere in rural Haiti are typically reluctant to reply and responses are evasive (Stycos, 1954; Murray 1972; Smith 1998). In the Opinion Survey, respondents commonly replied first with a curt, "However many God gives me" (mezi sa bon dieu bay mwen). Others responded, "All children, all children. Both girls and boys. They are all good." (Tout ti moun, yo tout bon, ni fi ni gason. Tout bon). One thirty-four-year-old father of six said "two, three, or thirty" (dè, twa, obyen trant). A forty-five-year-old mother of five said "well, fifty is good, six is good" (en ben, sinkant t-ap bon, sis la t-ap bon). One man who did not want to respond at all explained that he knew a guy who asked God to give him five children; so God gave him ten and then killed five. After considerable prompting, one woman said she wanted six children. An appalled bystander was caught on cassette saying, "now you won't get any more at all" (kounie-a ou pap fe menm anko).28

To get around the problem of directly asking "how many children do you want," the question was asked, "Which couple is better off, a husband and wife with three children or a husband and wife with six children?" Respondents were clearly less reluctant about replying to the "three or six children" question. Only three men refused to respond, insisting that the matter was up to God: 59 percent of total respondents favored the couple with six children being better off.29 But, the data indicated that a preference for the larger family is significantly influenced by the sex and age of the respondent. Thirteen of twenty-three women (57%) in the age range twenty through thirty-four years preferred six children, whereas in the over the age of fifty category, twenty of the twenty-three women (87%) preferred six children. Similarly, while only three of thirteen men (13%) in the twenty to thirty-four-year age group favored the family with six children, thirteen of twenty-seven men (52%) in the over fifty age group favored the larger family (see table 13.1).

##  Table 13.1: Preferred number of children by age and sex of respondent

Moreover, farmers who responded "three" usually did so with much discussion and evaluation of the choices. The biggest issue was school costs. Forty-three of the fifty-four respondents (84%) who chose three children explained that the cost of school was the principal reason for not wanting a greater number of children. Moreover, respondents spontaneously linked the importance of school with dwindling resources described as "hard times," "having nothing to stand on," and "necessity."

Three would be better. Because things are hard nowadays. Education. Things are hard. It was not _a long time ago you could have children. . . . Now, if you have ten children, you have to put all ten in school._ 30 (fifty-year-old mother of four)

_Three. If I had six, put all six in school, I would spend more money. But if I have three, I spend less. It is there you find the advantage. But if God gives you six, you are obliged to put all six in school. It is not in your interest. But if God takes care of you, it can be in your interest. There are people who have ten children. They are no help at all because their parents have nothing to stand on, they don't have any way to get by. And then there are those who have fifty children and they are better for it._ 31 (twenty-nine-year-old father of nine)

_Three would be better. Because sometimes you have all these children, the times are so bad you can not keep them in school._ 32 (thirty-five-year-old father of five)

_Better you have six children. But you cannot educate all of them._ 33 (thirty-four-year-old father of six)

In contrast, responses in favor of six children were usually clear and adamant declarations in favor of six.

_When you have six it is better for you. More people, more work, more things getting done. The work gets done faster._ 34 (forty-year-old mother of three)

_Six. Because if for example you are going out this morning, you are going to work in the garden or the market, you take three with you and you leave three to do the work at the house._ 35 (forty-three-year-old father of three)

_When you have six children it is better for you. Why? Because this morning, you are all by yourself, you send each child somewhere to do a job for you. Each job gets done at the same time._ 36 (thirty-five-year-old father of six)

_All six are important. All six. You send one to the left, one to the right, and the rest in all four cardinal directions._ 37 (forty-seven-year-old father of seven)

##  Sons vs. Daughters and Mothers vs. Fathers

Jean Rabel fathers favor daughters over sons at a rate of two to one. The principal reason given is that girls do more work, 20 percent of fathers also said that "girls are cooked food" (fi se manje kwit), a Jean Rabel expression that literally means that daughters are good to have because they maintain the homestead—they can make cooked food—and can fulfill the role of wives. But in clarifying, fathers often turn to the ability of daughters to obtain financial contributions and favors from men:

_The girls are better. Why? I could fall for one, this guy could fall for another. You yourself could fall for another. You understand? Prepared food. Women have more luck than men._ 38 (thirty-eight-year-old father of three)

_When a daughter lands in a good situation, she's likely to come gather you up. You can be pale and all washed up. In three days you're another color. . . . Girls are cooked food_.39 (thirty-two-year-old father of three)

_Cooked food. . . . If you have a daughter and she takes a man, she takes the man and she goes and lives with him. She lives with the man, and that man regards you better than he regards his own father._ 40 (sixty-two-year-old father of eleven)

_A guy who has daughters, he lives better. Because girls are prepared food. . . . If a jitney is coming down the road, the driver will put him in the front seat_.41 (seventy-five-year-old father of five)

##  Table 13.2: Reasons fathers gave for preferring daughters

Fathers favor their daughters, but daughters do not feel the same way about their fathers. The socially constructed gender behavior of men means that their lives are oriented outside the home as makers and tenders of distant gardens, tenders of livestock, professional craftsmen who often must voyage far from home as house builder, boat carpenter, sawyer, or as fisherman and migrant laborer in pursuit of wages to pay for homes, to afford gifts for lovers, and to pay for the education and upkeep of children, all necessary to rise above the label of vakabon. Thus, often absent from the homestead, men do not consistently participate in the upbringing of their children, they are seen as fickle, and they are correspondingly not, as seen in the téat song below, appreciated to the same degree as mothers.

On the other hand, Jean Rabel girls revere their mothers. Eight of the forty-two teat songs analyzed included refrains praising mothers—such as the above "I must caress her"—and designating gifts and money meant for the mother. And the relationship goes both ways: mothers reported favoring daughters over sons by a factor of four to one.

##  Table 13.3: Male and female, daughters vs. sons

Moreover, adult daughters take their mothers in to live with them at a much higher ratio than they take fathers in and they do so at a much higher ratio than their brothers do.42 Of the seventy-eight parents identified as living in a household headed by one of their children, fifty-nine of them were mothers, and in forty-six of these cases the host was a daughter (see table 13.4 below).43

##  Table 13.4: Sex of child who is hosting resident parent (N = 1,521)

But while mothers might occasionally live in homes with their daughters, the reason they favor them arguably has to with more immediate rewards. While some observers may object to a crass materialist approach, mothers themselves reported that the reason they prefer girls is because they are a tremendous source of help around the homestead: 62 percent of mothers gave this as the reason.

The value of girls means that women are eager to take in nieces, younger female cousins, and, in an institution known as restavek, less fortunate female offspring of other families—although the value of young girls also means they are seldom successful in procuring them. Girls learn young how to care for the household and how to perform tasks of the mother. By the age of twelve or thirteen years, Jean Rabel country girls can do everything their mothers can: cook, clean, take care of younger children, and sell in the market. Indeed, when arriving at homesteads in Jean Rabel, one often finds not the mother but a young teenage girl left in charge.

## Conclusion

The bottom line is that despite a few concerns about school costs, farmers in Jean Rabel want children. They see children as valuable economic assets and more children are better than fewer children. Furthermore, while concerns that may be associated with old age, such as illness, are important, farmers were not referring to adult offspring. When a sixty-five-year-old Jean Rabel woman says she can not live without children, that she needs someone to do errands for her, especially when she is sick, someone to fetch water and run to the market, she is not referring to her adult children. She is talking about her grandchildren, nieces, godchildren, or the children of neighbors, something that, as will be discussed shortly, is critical to understanding high birth rates in Jean Rabel. Thus, statements like "children are the wealth of the poor" (pitit se byen malere) and "it is children who save the homestead" (se ti moun ki sove kay la) are direct references to the tasks that young children perform. These are burdensome time-consuming tasks thought of as humiliating for an adult, but tasks that, nevertheless, must be accomplished to maintain a viable and productive household and to free adults to engage in outside income-earning endeavors. Both mothers and fathers prefer daughters over sons and while the most immediate reason is for the labor contributions and greater involvement in the household, another reason discussed shortly is that daughters are capable of having more children, thereby contributing further to the household labor pool. In the following chapter, I show how the high demand for children that derives from their economic utility conditions kinship, conjugal union, and the rights, duties, and expectations associated with rearing children and benefiting from their labor.

## *****

## Notes

1. In sixty-eight of the households the ranking male household member was interviewed and in sixty-eight of the households the ranking woman was interviewed. Unintelligible responses were omitted.

2. Pou kisa yon moun fe ti moun, se pou li ka ed-o. Kounye-a la lè ou we-m pati se mwen k-ap al nan dlo-a, min lè ou we-m vini, mwen jwen dlo-a. Se mwen t-ap al nan bwa, lè m vini ke mwen jwenn bwa-a.

3. Bon dieu, Bon Dieu. Se pa mwen te vle fe yo, Bon Dieu. Tout ou jwenn sa, Bon Dieu fe yo. (Wi men gen anpil moun ki bezwenn fe ti moun). Wi. (Kouman ou ta santi si ou pa ta genyen). Si m pat genyen li t-ap pi mal pou mwen. (Men pou ki rezon ou we ou gen yo?) Ou bezwenn ti dlo, yo al nan dlo. Ou bezwenn ti bwa, yo al nan bwa. Ti gason yo al travay nan jaden pou ou. Yo fe bet pou ou, y-al lonje yo, al mare yo nan jaden.

4. Ti moun nan se yon bagay ki nesesè. Pase ou bezwenn voye ou ka di, ' pitit, koulye-a, pou mwen, al chèche yon ti difè pou mwen,' 'al chèche yon ti bwa,' 'al nan mache.'

5. Pou ki sa m fe ti moun? Mwen pa konprann. Ti moun la pou sevi . Tout kondi sevis pa-ou. Pa-ou, kondi sevis pa ou. M pa ka konprann sa-k mennen lakay ou....

6. Si ou pa gen ti moun, chyen k-ap manje ou. Si ou pa gen ti moun yon kote pou bay ou yon ti dlo, pou ba ou yon ti dife. Si ou fe sa obyen ou gen yon bagay k-ap fe ou mal, moun fin ou ye.

7. Non, paske se yon pwotejman ti moun yo ye. Paske ti moun yo bezwenn ede o nan travay. Se ti moun ki sove kay la.

8. O gran janme. Ti moun an pa janm bouke. Ti moun se bet. Ti moun an pa janm fatigue. Y-ap fe tout travay. Yo t-al nan dlo. Y-ap fe tout travay.

9. Non, m pa ka viv san ti moun. Ou pa ka viv nan kay ou sel... Ti moun pa-m mwen. Yon m bezwenn nan bouk, m voye li. M bezwenn nan dlo, m voye li. M bezwenn nan bwa, m voye yo. Li pa ka di-m non. Alo, yè egzakmwen, ki zanimo mare la m voye al chanje, si m gon pitit yo chanje li. Yon pa ka kanpe devan mwen pou di-m non. En sel lavi grandi.

10. Mwen menm? Pou vi tann sa a? Mwen? Si m pa ta gen ti moun menm, m pa ta fe isit menm. M t-ap pati, m tap al deyè lòt boulet, ke m tap al chèche lot travay ke m fe pou yo peye-m kob.

11. Actually, farmers expressed favoritism for girls (see chapter 15).

12. Adults expressed this debt to children, owed in the form of education;

"Me? I need children all the time because it is all the time that children are working for me . [But] What I am going to tell you is no lie. In the month of October I send all five of these children to school. Then, lunch pail in hand, I take the hoe, and I set to weeding all by myself. I go the whole day without decent food. I weed the garden. It's the truth. No lie. Because these days children can't make it without school." (forty-four-year-old mother of five)

(Mwen menm, m bezwenn ti moun tout tann paskè mwen menm se tout tann ti moun yo fe travay pou mwen . Sa m di ou se pa manti. Nan mwa oktob m voye tou le sink ti moun sa lekol. Kounye-a manje nan min um, m pran wou a, met sakle, kounye-a m oblije pase jounen san manje net, m-ap sakle. Vreman, se pa manti. Kounye-a la, pliskè ti moun an pa ka leve san li pa lekol...)

"School is the number one thing a parent can do for a child. [But] It was not a long time ago it was livestock that was best to give your child." (thirty-one-year-old father of five)

(Lekol se premiè byen ke yon paran ka fe pou yon ti moun. Se pa lontan se yon bet ou te bay ti moun ke fe yo byen.)

The data used in the main text to illustrate the importance of school was actually a subsample of eighty-four Opinion Survey respondents. The reason for the "subsample," and not the entire sample, was that question was added after the survey had begun. Twenty-five of the eighty-four respondents (30%) said they sent children to school only to help the child when he or she was grown and thirty-eight respondents (45%) indicated that educating children was in the interest of both parents and children.

13. Y-ap bay ou 500 dola pa mwa, OK, ou nan kay ou sel o e lè lafyev pran ou e lè maladi pran ou, sa ka okipe ou?

14. Non. M pa ka dako, sa pa ka itil ou anyen. Wi, eskè m-ap touche 500 dola le mwa, epi m pa gen yon moun pou m di ale la, al pran ti gallon, al pran empè dlo pou mwen. Ala m-ap touche 500 dola le mwa, ala se pa desann m-ap desann, se pa grandi m-ap grandi. Tout tann,, m pap desann? . . . Premiè byen yon moun se pitit-o. Chyen ap manje o.

15. Non. Pitit gen valè pase lajan.

16. Non. Pase, li pa fe sans . . . M tap pito pitit, paske gran moun kon di, pitit se byen pou malere.

17. Non. Pase m bezwenn ti moun nan. M ka d-ou, ou gen lajan min ou pa ka voye lajan. Ou gen kob la, pa fwa, epi lajan asanm av-ou ou pedi yo.

18. Pou ki rezon m pa t-ap dako? Gen yon mwayen, m rive, m kouche la, m malad. Kob la m pa ka voye li, m-ap mouri sou li. Bagay ki pa ka fe anyen pou mwen. Se moun pou pran kob la, ki prale, achte avek, e pran sa m merite. E m pa gen ti moun pou met nan kob la.

19. Non. Si m bezwenn yon ti dlo la, kob la pa ka ba-m mwen. Mwen pa ka voye lajan.

20. Non. Paske mwen si m pa fe ti moun, demen si dieu vle, lè m malad m pa ta jwenn moun pou ede-m.

21. Ah, ou met gen lajan nan kay la min si ou pat gen moun pou fe pou ou. Ou met gen lajan. Kounie-a ou met kouche mouri, si se pa pou yon moun kanpe fe yon bagay pou ou, lajan pa ke fe. Lajan, ou met domi sou lajan, pa ka fe pou ou, se moun ki pou kanpe fe pou ou.

22. O, pitit-la se byen o li ye. Si ou pa fe pitit, chyen pi miyo pas-o. Non. M pito pitit la. Pitit la se yon ed pou ou. Maten a si voye pitit la la, li jwenn lavi se ou menm ki jwenn lavi.

23. M pa t-ap dako. E pitit la, kob la pa fe anyen pou mwen, non. Si m malad, m-ap regle yon bagay, ti moun nan si li la l-ap fe yo. E si m malad m pa ka voye lajan.

24 Non. Sa-k fe sa? Paskè pitit se byen pou malere. Pitit se byen.

25. O, non. (PKS). Lajan pa byen, se pitit ki ye, ki byen pou malere. Lajan pa byen.

26. Non. Paskè ou gen lajan la, si ou al jwenn yon moun pou fe yon bagay pou ou, li rete la. Min ti moun an, depi m malad la, gade pitit um ap bouye pou mwen, ap lave pou mwen, ap bagay pou mwen. E te lajan li te ye li pa tap fe anyen pou mwen.

27. M ta mande yon chans pou fe yon ti moun, m jwenn ti moun nesesè. M pa ta dako. Ti moun itil.

28. There was also some reluctance to respond to any questions about children. Some respondents refused to give children's names and some refused to divulge how many children they have or gave false information. Some responded easily to questions about adult activities and then clammed up when the issue of children was introduced. The most widespread fear among farmers is that the identities of their children may be recorded and the children sacrificed in rituals of black magic, sold to demons, or put in a jakout (grass storage sack) and subsequently eaten. There is even a widely recounted myth of a white boogeyman called "three buckets" (twa ti bokit) who goes around gathering children up, cutting them into pieces, and then carries them back to the city to eat with his white friends.

29. Translation from: Tout bon! (M d-ou twa m d-ou sis, fok ou di-m sa-k pi bon nan yo). Eh, si, eh. Bon. Nòmal. Sou afe ti moun nan, si bon dieu ba ou twa ti moun, li pa bay ou anko, w-ap rete sou sa bondieu ba ou-a. (Wi w-ap rete sou sa li ba ou, min se yon kesyon m-ap poz-o) Mwen la tou bon madanmmwazel. (Wi, m konprann, 'tout bon'. Min m t-ap mand-o, sou kesyon, twa sis, sak pi bon nan yo? Fok ou we si se twa obyen sis la). [Silans] Sis la. (pou ki sa). Li la, l-ap ba-m yon ed. (Min twa ka bay ou ed tou, min sis la?) Sis la, sis la ap ba ou ed. Gen sa-k kap al nan jaden., y-ap al nan dlo, y-ap al lave. (Silans). En ben, twa.

30. Twa ta pi bon. Paskè bagay la di kounye-a. Preparasyon. Bagay la di. Se pa lontan, lè lontan ou te ka fe ti moun. . . . Kounye-a si ou gen dis pitit, pou ou met tout lekol.

31. Twa. En ben, si m gen sis, mete tou le sis lekol, m ta depanse plis kob. Min si m gen twa, m depanse mwens kob. Se la avantay li ka genyen. Min si bon dieu bay ou sis la, ou oblije mete tou le sis lekol, li pa nan avantay ou. Min si bon dieu pran swenn ou, yo ka nan avantay. Gen moun ki fe dis, yo pa itil yo menm paskè pye yo pa bon, pa gen kote pou pase. Gen ki fe 50 pou yo ede paran.

32. Twa t-ap pi bon. Paskè dè fwa ou gen tout ti moun sa epok sitelman pa bon ou pa jwenn posibilite pou ou ka kontiue ti moun lekol.

33. Pito sis ti moun min ou pa ka fe edikasyon pa yo.

34. Lè ou gen sis la li pi bon pou ou. (Pou ki sa?) Plis moun, plis sevis, plis okipasyon. Travay la mache pi vit.

35. Sis. Paske si petet maten an w-wap pati, ou al nan travay, ou pat a twa, lòt twa rete lakay la ap ede lakay la.

36. Lè ou gen sis ti moun nan li pi bon pou ou. (Pou ki sa?) Pou ki sa? Kounie-a maten-a, ou sel la, kounye-a ou voye chak ti moun yon kote, fe yon sevis pou ou, kounye-a tout sevis regle ansanm.

37. Tou le sis toujou impotan (Non, si ou ta gen twa o di mwen sis, kies nan yo ki tap plis impotan?). Tou le sis. (Eskè se sis k-ap impotan obyen eske se twa k ap impotan). Tou le sis ap impotan w-ap voye yon adwat yon agoch, tou le kat fasad.

38. Fi yo pi bon. Pou ki rezon? Sa vle di, mwen menm m gen dwa we nan yon pitit fi nan yo. Myseu sa gen dwa we yon nan yo. Ou menm ou gen dwa we nan yon nan yo. Ou konprann. Manje pare. Fi gen plis chans pase gason.

39. Lè ou we pitit fi-a tonbe yon kote, li ka ranmase ou. L-ap ranmase ou. Ou te met blanch konsa, nan dè twa jou la-p vin yon lòt koulè. . . . Fi se manje kwit.

40. Manje kwit . . . Si ou gon pitit fi li pran gason, li pran myseu li rete ave. Lè lì rete a myseu, myseu a regade papa pi mal pase bopè.

41. Neg ki gen sink ti fi viv pi byen. (Pou ki sa?) Pou ki sa? Paskè, fi se manje tou pare. . . . Si se yon machinn ki sou wout, chofè ap monte-m mete-m devan.

42. Indeed, looking at residence patterns in table 13.4, in which it is seen that only two fathers are hosted by daughters, it is difficult to understand why fathers favor daughters and not sons.

43. As mentioned earlier, 12 percent of teat songs put together by female dance troops included refrains praising their mother and designating gifts and money meant for the mother, the most common of which has the girl returning home after going away, "If you see me carrying a gift, it is for my mother, Manman come it" (Si ou we m pote yon kado se pou fe manman-m kado, Manman vin pran nan min). Fidelity to mothers in this respect is one of the most conspicuous principles of a good daughter.

## *****

# Chapter 14

#  Raising Children and Control Over Child Labor Activities

## Introduction

In prior chapters I illustrated the all-important role of the household and associated farming livelihood strategies, the division of labor, the economic utility of children, and the value that parents attach to children. In this chapter I look at the most immediate costs, behaviors, and relations that pertain to childbirth, rearing children, and control over children. I will show how the economic value of children conditions kinship and family patterns and how the nature of this conditioning hinges on the costs of pregnancy—most importantly in terms of the lost labor contributions from the mother—and the costs to chape children—meaning to get offspring through the critical infant and toddler ages.

## Birth

When a child is born in rural Jean Rabel, the umbilical cord is tied off and cut. The newborn is wiped with a damp cloth, and the breast is given almost immediately. Purgatives are not given to the child, as they are in some other regions of Haiti. The infant stays completely confined in the house with its mother for the first five days of life. Jean Rabeliens are extreme in their encouragement of the use of supplements to nourish the newborn. By eleven to fifteen days after birth—and sometimes earlier—the baby is being given supplements in the form of tea and sugar-water, and some women even begin feeding a kind of homemade baby food, usually a paste made from a type of dried plantain called kiyez. Jean Rabeliens believe that girls develop physically faster than boys, and so at two months a girl is encouraged to sit up, kase, while a boy is not encouraged to do this until three months of age.

##  The Costs of Rearing Children

The cost of a child is not so much in money and remunerated medical care but rather the loss of the mother's time and contributions to the households. In rural Jean Rabel, there are few direct costs involved in caring for an infant. Parents do not use cribs or disposable diapers, nor do they provide children with a plethora of toys or baby clothes. They do not feed children with expensive baby formulas or pay for daycare services. The infant sleeps in bed with its mother, is changed with a couple of homemade and reusable diapers, wrapped in a Goodwill towel that costs about 15 gdes (US$0.90), and dressed in Goodwill shoes and clothes that together may cost 50 gdes (US$3.00). The infant is fed breast milk and homemade baby formulas, and is surrounded by a neverending throng of aunts, sisters, cousins, grandmothers, and male relatives that provide the kind of cost-free attention and care that only family members can provide.1

The approximately 50 percent of mothers and infants who visit local clinics can expect to pay a total of 41 gdes (US$2.50) for a checkup, vaccinations, and vitamins during and after pregnancy. Another 5 gdes (US$0.30) are paid for a birthing packet (included are a razor blade, a string for tying the umbilical cord, and sterile gloves).2 Most women employ midwives at an expense of 50 gdes (US$3.00). All totaled, the maximum direct costs of pregnancy, birth, and the first six months of infancy are approximately 161 gdes (less than US$10.00). After the first six months, a child eats what his/her parents eat and wears cheap pepe (Goodwill clothing).

## Paternity

The primary expenses associated with childbirth and childrearing come with caring for the mother. A man is typically expected to assume responsibility for these costs. When a woman becomes pregnant, and if she is not in union, she is expected to name a father. If a woman does in fact name a father (and she sometimes does not), and if the man accepts paternity (which he almost always does), then that man must help support the mother and child. In cases where a man denies paternity, it is difficult or impossible to force him to support the child. But such cases are extremely rare. In a review of the May 1999 Jean Rabel birth registry, only 5 of 469 (1%) of registered births were fatherless (called a deklarasyon mere). Unlike in the United States where "paternity suit" is synonymous with forcing a man to be responsible for a child, Jean Rabel paternity suits almost always involve a man suing a woman because he has been denied control over his child; or, the most common of all, mothers assigning paternity to multiple fathers, one publicly and one in secrecy.

These are critical points because they highlight the labor value of children seen in previous chapter, revealing a struggle for control over child labor that gives way to a series of anthropologically fascinating institutions in rural Haiti. Fathers, even men who know they have been cuckolded, rarely refuse to accept paternity. The man who is not the real father is said to have been given a kout pitit, literally translated as having been clobbered with a child. But he typically accepts the responsibility, if not eagerly, then without objections. Judges in the area report that this practice occurs commonly. As mentioned in chapter 6, in a farming community where I lived, 13 percent of men (seven of fifty-two) had at least one child who friends and neighbors reported was also secretly recognized by another man as his own. I also discussed in chapter 6 the fictive illness known as perdisyon, whereby gestation is thought to have become arrested and can remain in suspension for as long as five years, allowing women to dupe their present and former spouses and lovers into accepting paternity for children sired by other men; or perhaps, to rephrase, allowing men a face-saving mechanism for accepting paternity for children who do not biologically belong to them.

Far more common than men denying paternity are cases where a woman and her family do not approve of a particular father and refuse to recognize him. The family makes this denial legal by registering the mother's father (the child's grandfather) or another male relative as the child's natural father. Related to this is control wielded by mother's mother. As will be seen in greater detail in the following chapter, many of the first or first several children born in the home of the maternal grandmother become hers. By virtue of her superior economic position and influence, she commandeers them. The grandchildren refer to her, and not the biological mother, as manman or momi.

In the event a named father does not support the child, or the woman has refused him rights, the woman may accept support from another man during her pregnancy and the nursing period. This "father" is known as the papa nouriti (the nourishing father), and it is then him who has paternal rights to the child's labor and it is him who must be repaid if the biological father wishes to gain control over his child.

The man is expected to begin helping to provide for the mother as soon as her pregnancy becomes apparent. When the baby is born, the paternal grandmother brings ginger, plantains, and chickens or a goat to be slaughtered and fed to the postpartum mother. When mother and infant emerge from the customary five days of postpartum confinement, the "mother-in-law" again brings plantains and meat (a goat is brought and killed if none was slaughtered at the occasion of the birth). For the next two to three months the woman remains in semi-confinement and does little work. During this period, the man is expected to provide extra amounts of meat, and other nourishing foods.3 The father must also plant a garden for the mother and child and allocate animals to them—animals that he cares for and the proceeds from which will go to help the mother chape the child (see below). When a child begins primary school, it is also the father who is expected to pay the 345 gdes a year (US$20.53) needed for tuition and the obligatory school uniform.4

## The Working Child

The working child is, as seen, an important and necessary factor in household livelihood security. The most important stage in child development is that point when he or she becomes more of a benefit than a cost, a point denoted by the term chape (literally, "to escape"). A child is considered to chape "when he can do for himself" (li ka fe pou kont li), "when he can wash his own clothes" (lè li ka lave rad pa li), "when he can 'get by'" (lè li ka boukannen),5 and "when he can go to the water by himself" (lè li ka al nan dlo pou kont li).6 The word is also inverted to apply to the act and cost of bringing a child to the point where he can not only take care of his own needs, but also make contributions to the survival of the household. The notion of chape was mentioned recurrently during the followup survey as in the examples given below:

_Oh, why does a person have children? You have children. You struggle to chape them. . . .You raise them. They chape. Tomorrow God willing, if you need a little water, the child can get it for you. If you need a little firewood, he can carry it for you._ 7 (fifty-five-year-old father of seventeen children)

_I had children, now I have a problem, now the children can solve the problem. Tomorrow God willing I cannot help myself, it is on the children I will depend. Today I chape them. Tomorrow God willing we struggle with life together._ 8 (forty-one-year-old mother of four children)

In rural Jean Rabel, children as young as two and three years of age do small chores like fetching utensils and carrying messages to the neighbors. At three to four years of age they are going to the water with other children and returning with a gallon jug awkwardly balanced on their head. At five to eight years of age the child will chape, for it is at these ages he/she begins to go by himself to the water, start a fire, wash clothes, tend animals, find food in the garden, and go alone to make small purchases in the market. By the age of seven, boys are typically trusted to tend goats and sheep without supervision by an adult or older child. By the age of eleven a boy can hoe a garden and may even participate in reciprocal work groups composed of other prepubescent and teenage boys. Similarly, by eight or nine years of age a girl can sell goods during short absences of her mother, both in the market or the home, and she can wash most clothes—except for large bulky items like pants, which require considerable strength to wring out. By ten or eleven years of age most girls have already had the experience of taking the family donkey on a twenty- to thirty-mile trek to and from a market to make purchases for the household. At this age, the girl does not go alone but in groups with other young girls or with a neighbor. As seen above, by the age of twelve or thirteen, Jean Rabel country girls can do everything their mother can, making the labor value of girls, coupled with their ability to bear additional children, significant factors in parents favoring daughters over sons (see previous chapter).

## The Parental Contract

In Jean Rabel households, there is a clearly defined system of mutual rights, duties, obligations, and benefits that are exchanged between parents and children and that continue from a child's youth into adulthood. The "contract" begins at the time of the mother's pregnancy when she acknowledges a man's paternity, thereby offering him the opportunity to share the right of co-parentage. As shown, fathers must subsequently earn their paternal rights by helping to care for the mother and helping to chape (raise) the child. The parents' most immediate reward for raising children is the access to needed labor. It is an inalienable parental right to govern the labor activities of their children. However, as we will see in the following chapter, a major determinant of family patterns has to do with whether the child is born in the house of the mother's mother—as most first and many second and third children are—because then it is the grandmother who exercises primary control. Other people, such as godparents, also exercise control over children by virtue of their relationship to the parents, and a child owes obedience to family members and older friends.

In their turn, parents in Jean Rabel, like parents everywhere, have an obligation to feed, provide clothes, and generally care for their young children. Parents also increasingly have an obligation to educate their children, an obligation that family, friends, and neighbors enforce by criticizing a parent for not sending children to school. Children themselves will also pressure their parents, saying at very young ages things like "my father does not like us, he does not want to pay for school." (Papa-m pa reme nou. Li pa vle peye lekol). Parents begin giving their children animals when they are as young as four or five years of age, and an attempt is made to increase the child's stock as she or he grows. Parents are expected to give land, even if only a small amount, to both sons and daughters as soon as they are capable of farming or soliciting someone else to farm for them. Also, as they come of age and begin to start their own families, children have the right to claim a portion of their parents' property. With increasing population and declining availability of land, education has increasingly begun to supplant gifts of land and animals to children. Nevertheless, children who do not migrate pressure parents to begin ceding property as soon as they begin bearing children of their own and enter into a conjugal union. Children cannot be deprived of these rights on the whim of their parents or other relatives, and all legitimate children claim an equal share of the parental property. Should a man have several "wives"—which was found during the Baseline Survey to be true for 11 percent of male household heads—the children of one woman generally have no rights to property purchased by their father for another woman (see following two chapters). All of a woman's children have the same rights over her personal estate.

In return, children are socially and legally obligated to care for their parents in their old age. A parent or grandparent can never be refused food or care. Children bathe, feed, wash clothes, and clean up after their infirm parents and grandparents. Not caring for an elder is considered shameful, and community members will criticize and humiliate the irresponsible younger kin of the elderly individual. Should one family member take care of an elder and other family members refuse to assist, the considerate member has a right to call her negligent brothers, sisters, and/or cousins into court and force them to pay an indemnity.9

##  Godparents and their Rights and Duties

It is inconceivable that a child in Jean Rabel should be without godparents. The parents select godparents almost immediately after the birth of a child. The godparents sometimes are asked to name the child and their own names are written on the back of the child's birth certificate. Generally, a Catholic priest ceremonially consecrates the relationship of the godparents to the child during baptism, although if the parents are Protestant the godparents and parents may simply present the child to the pastor. In both cases, the formalization of ties between godparents and their new godchild is a happy and symbolically important event. A small fet (celebration) is held in honor of the occasion at the parents' or mother's house, complete with kolas (Haitian sodas), gato (cake), and kremas (liquor made with condensed milk, rum, and sugar).

The naming of godparents initiates important fictive kinship relations. A godchild addresses his godfather and godmother by the terms parenn (godfather) and marenn (godmother) and these take on the roles of surrogate parents. The biological children and all the other godchildren of the marenn and parenn become fictive brothers and sisters and are sometimes referred to as sè (sister) and frè (brother). The spouses of both godfather and godmother—as the two are seldom chosen as a pair of spouses—also take on the status of marenn and parenn, meaning that a child usually has two godmothers and two godfathers. The biological parents as well as all the godparents assume a relationship to one another of kompere and kommere (co-father and co-mother), meaning they are co-parents, and they all refer to one another and address one another with titles of makompere and makommere (my co-father and my co-mother). They also assume an incest taboo vis a vis one another—albeit the taboo is weak and easily violated.

The selection of a godparent is strategic. In large, economically secure families that have good land holdings, godparents are often chosen from among immediate relatives such as a brother, sister, uncle, or aunt, a selection that maintains control over the child and his labor within the family. Among the less fortunate, godparents typically have no kinship relation to the biological parents and are often chosen from the ranks of people who have higher socioeconomic status than the biological parents, something that can be viewed as a trade: the poor parents offer partial control of a child and his or her labor and in return they have special relationship with the more powerful godparents, a relationship that may benefit both them and the child.

Godparents have obligations to godchildren that at first glance make godparentage appear to be a burden, especially to outsiders who find themselves offered the privilege of being a godparent but have no need for the labor of the child—and therefore do not see the advantage. Godparents should, and usually do, contribute to the upbringing of their godchildren. They have a tacit obligation to help pay for the child's education. Godparents should also contribute to the child's marriage or any other major and costly life event. But despite the appearance, godparentage is considered to be a privilege and honor that is more often accepted than declined. One of the fundamental reasons for this is that there is the very tangible benefit of gaining access to the godchild's labor (a fact not generally emphasized in studies that have examined godparentage in Haiti and elsewhere in the Caribbean and Latin America: see Foster, 1969, 1953; Nutini and Bell 1980; Lowenthal 1987: 164; Mintz and Wolf 1950; Simpson 1942; and for an exception see Glenn Smucker, 1983: 197–200; the labor advantage of godchildren in Haiti is mentioned by MacKenzie 1830: 273).

A godchild, called a fiyel, should never refuse service to a godparent. Godchildren are obliged to visit godparents, they sometimes sleep over at their houses, especially when the godparent needs extra hands for a particular task, and they sometimes spend school vacations with godparents. If a godparent should need assistance, he or she has the right to summon the child and even has the right to whip the child should he or she disobey. As one Jean Rabel man jokingly explained, "you can whip a godchild all you want, only thing is you cannot kill them—they will put you in prison for that."10 At least one person in the Opinion Survey responded to the question, "what would you do if you had no children," by saying:

_I would ask my co-mother or my co-father if I could get a child. That means, I would ask if I could take the child as mine because a godchild is the same thing as a child._ 11 (thirty-one-year-old father of five children)

##  Friends, Relatives, and Restaveks

Twenty percent of Jean Rabel children live in households headed by grandparents or other relatives—either with or without their parents present. Furthermore, 25 percent of households in the Opinion Survey reported having at least one resident child who is not the offspring or grandchild of the household head (see table 13.1 and table 13.2).

##  Table 14.1: Child residence patterns: Relationship of child household members to head of household (Missing = 86; children under nineteen years of age)

##  Table 14.2: Unrelated children in the house

Role switching is not uncommon in these households. A female household head, no matter what her relationship to children, may be addressed as momi (a mother-like term) and where the grandmother is present, young children sometimes refer to her as manman (mother) while calling the mother by her real name, as if she were a sister. In some instances parents leave children with relatives because they cannot care for the children themselves. But children are welcome and in many cases it is not so much a matter of the child being left as it is a case of the child being requested. People who no longer have children of their own remaining in the house—because, for example, their own children are grown and have established independent households or have gone to school in the city—may ask a relative or friend for a child. Grandparents are especially likely to raise grandchildren, but uncles, aunts, siblings, cousins, and others take in children as well. Old people who live alone are almost always "given" a grandchild, niece, nephew, or godchild to sleep with them and to perform tasks around the house. There is also an institution that exists called restavek (literally translated as stay-with), through which a child is given to an unrelated person for the primary purpose of performing domestic chores (referred to elsewhere as the institution ti moun, see Herskovits 1937; Simpson 1942; Metraux 1951; Smucker 1983). The possibility of upward social mobility generally plays an important role in all of these arrangements, especially the restavek. People who take the children are invariably either of higher socioeconomic status or, because they have no or few other children, they can offer the child better care, better clothes, and better schooling. Indeed, there is an expectation, if not an explicit verbal contract, that the child will be educated when turned over to another household. For example, a man in the Opinion Survey explained:

I went and took two kids from some people I know. I put both of them in school. Why? Why? It is so hard for me to live without children. . . . I need water. Right now I had one with me, he went to the house to get me some water. Tomorrow, God willing, he goes to school, I do all I can to give him shoes and clothes to put on. Food too.12 (sixty-two-year-old father of eleven)

The practice of giving children away to family, friends, or acquaintances who are better off financially, and the fact that people need children to help with daily subsistence tasks sometimes produce strange results. There are Jean Rabel households in which the natural offspring of the household head have all gone to live with better off relatives in the village or in a distant urban center. These have then been replaced in the household by nieces, nephews, cousins, or the children of unrelated acquaintances who come from less economically fortunate and usually more rurally located households. But it must be emphasized that true restavek in the village and distant cities may come from rural Jean Rabel but households that have them are statistically rare. Only 2 percent of children in the Baseline Survey were living in homes other than those owned and managed by their mother, grandmother, or another close family member.13

The value of children means there are few true orphans in the area in the sense of being without someone to care for them. In a study of all orphanages in the Northwest Department of Haiti, in which Jean Rabel population is about one-eighth of the total, I found that virtually all functioned in a manner similar to boarding schools in the United States: most children had parents, most were not from the ranks of the poorest farmers but rather the Haitian orphanage managers shared access to free books, education, and overseas contacts with offspring of wealthier farmers, their own family, and even with offspring of adults who had migrated to Miami. In some cases the orphanage owners had sent for their own young relatives in the city to be "orphans." In other cases farmers rented their children to the orphanage in exchange for part of the money sent by the child's overseas sponsor.

##  Children, Work, and the Whip

In the Follow-up Survey it was not asked if parents and guardians whip their children; it was asked why parents and guardians whip their children. None of the respondents replied, "I don't whip my children." Almost invariably the reason cited was work related. Twenty percent of respondents said they primarily whipped for failing to perform chores. Another 26 percent responded that they whipped principally for negligence if, for example, the child did not properly tether an animal or allowed a pig to raid the kitchen when left in charge of the household. Another 29 percent of the responses fell within the category of "disrespect." When children themselves were asked what "disrespect" meant, their answer invariably turned out to be related to work performance. For example, children explained that they show "disrespect" by not obeying, lè yo fe ou fe yon bagay, tankou lè yo voye ou (when they make you do something, like when they send you on an errand).

Whipping children is thought of as necessary and important in making children perform chores. A proud mother of a well-behaved child explained, "you know what makes that child work so hard? She is scared of the whip." Another Jean Rabel farmer explained the relationship between whippings and work as follows:

_When they say a child is afraid of the switch it does not mean that when the child sees the switch he starts crying. No. It means the child is always thinking about the switch in everything he does. This is what makes a child walk straight._ 14

People sometimes jokingly say, Kale, kale, kale. Ti moun fet pou kale (Whip! Whip! Whip! Children are born to be whipped!). But the whipping a child receives is generally no joke. The child is usually held by the hand and whipped about the bare legs with a raso (braided rope whip), a rigwaz (a strip of dried bull testicles also used on mules and horses), or a fret (a thin, flexible branch taken from a bush or tree). By Western standards the whipping is brutal. The child typically does much screaming and begs for mercy. Blood is sometimes drawn and many children bear scars on their legs. "Children" as old as their late teens and even into their early twenties are whipped across the palms by schoolteachers or made to kneel for hours at a time as punishment for not turning in homework or for speaking disrespectfully. Young women are sometimes switched severely for consorting with men of whom their parents disapprove (see Murray 1977: 172; and Metraux 1951 for descriptions of severity with children).15

## Conclusion

Maternity, paternal obligations to support a pregnant woman or mother with a child who has yet to chape, earned paternal rights, and godparentage define who controls the labor activities of a child. These are reciprocal relationships in that everyone involved must also contribute to the child's growth and education. But the most significant feature of the relationships, the one that takes precedence above all else, is that the child must work, he must do as he is told by those who have a right to control his activities, and the recourse to corporal punishment assures that he or she will in fact cooperate. In this way the relationships described are conditioned by the distribution of rights over the control of child labor. In the following chapter the presence of children and control over their productive labor activities are shown to be principal factors in consecrating a conjugal union and defining rights and duties between spouses.

## *****

## Notes

1. The most common baby formula is made with a banana-like plantain called a kiyez. Milk may be added as well as smashed crackers.

2. Even in the very worst case scenario when antibiotics, antifungal agents, antimalaria pills and antacid are called for, clinicians report that costs should not exceed 58 gdes (US$3.50). A Caesarean can cost as much as 1,000 gdes (US$60.00).

3. The duration of semi-confinement is the only custom discovered that bears on the difference between boys versus girls. If a woman has given birth to a boy she will not begin to do significant chores again and she will take extraordinary care not to immerse her body in cold water or expose herself to the cold for approximately three months. If the child is a girl, the time is usually two months. The explanation is that carrying and birthing a boy is harder on a woman. Similarly, girls will be encouraged to sit up (kase) at a younger age than boys—the same two versus three months.

4. The typical cost for primary school in rural Jean Rabel for the 1999–2000 school year was 35 gdes first payment, 25 gdes per month, and 75 to 100 gdes to make a school uniform, a school year total of 345 gdes (US$20.53).

5. "Lè li ka boukannen'"(when he can barbeque) is an expression that derives from children digging up and cooking sweet potatoes, something young children, especially boys, often do, and it signifies a child's ability to look after himself.

6. The term chape literally means to escape and in this literal sense of the word a person can chape a danger on their own or someone can chape them—save them. Similarly the term chape can be used to describe that point at which a child "escapes" the dangers of infant and childhood disease and, in this way, people in Jean Rabel sometimes use chape as a synonym for weaned. Chape can also be used to describe a child who has managed to finish school and find a well-paying job; such a person has chaped the "small" life of an impoverished farmer. By the same token, a mother may go barefoot to chape, in this instance to educate, her older children. But the most common connotation of the term chape and one that all adults interviewed were in agreement with denotes that point when a child is more of a benefit than a cost. In addition to the quotes already given in the body of the text, others include Lè ou ka pran ti moun an e mete li kinpot kote epi l-ap viv (when you can put a child anywhere and he will survive), Lè li konnen kouman pou mande pou manje (when he knows how to ask for food), lè li gen lespri (when a child achieves common sense), lè li ka rete nan kay la pou kont li (when he can get by without constant adult supervision ), and lè li ka retire min ni nan difè (when he will take his hand out of the fire).

7. O, pou ki yon moun fe ti moun? Ke vle di, ou fe ti moun nan. W-ap bat pou chape yo. . . L-ap grandi yo. L-ap chape. Demen si dieu vle, si ou bezwen ti dlo li ka ba ou. Si ou bezwenn ti bout bwa li ka pote li pou ou. Ou bezwenn ni konn ed.

8. Mwen fe ti moun, kounye-a m vin gen yon pwoblem, kounye-a ti moun ka redi pwoblem. Demen si dieu vle, m vin pa kapab, se sou kont ti moun m-ap vini. Kounye-a map chape yo. Demen si dieu vle yo ka bat ave-m.

9. The second question a person in Jean Rabel asks, right after "Do you have any children?" is "Are your parents alive?" (Mama ou la? Papa ou la?). Then, "Where are they?" (Kote yo ye?) "Do they miss you?" (Yo pa sonje ou?), and finally, "Are you going to visit them?" (Lè ou al lòt bo eskè ou pral vizite yo?).Woe to those who reply that they do not visit their mother or send her money, "You should go see her. She misses you. She is the one who made you. You seem to be a bad person" (Fo ou al we mam'o. L'ap sonj'o. Se li ki fe ou. Ou gen lè pa bon moun.).

10. Ou met kale li jan ou vle sof ou pa ka touye li—pou sa y-ap mete ou prizon.

1. Pa fwa ou we ou pa gen ti moun konsa, m te kapab fe deman a makomè oswa makompè epi pou m te ka jwenn ti moun sa. Ke vle di, pou li ka sevi-m. Paskè yon fiyel se yon pitit.

12. M ale nan min moun, m pran dè ti moun. M mete yo tou dè lekol anko. Pou ki, pou ki? Telman m pa ka viv san ti moun. . . . M bezwenn dlo-a, kounye-a m te gen yon isit ave-m, li al lakay pou yo voye dlo pou mwen. Demen si dieu vle li al lekol la, m toujou bat pou li gen sandal li avek rad pou mete, ni pou li manje.

13. The restavek institution is a rural-village and rural-urban phenomenon; rural farmers loan children to town and city people to gain sociopolitical and commercial contacts in village and urban areas and to attain educational opportunities for their children.

14. Lè yo di yon ti moun krent fret se pa lè yo we fret yo krie, non, se lè yo toujou panse sou fret nan tout bagay yap fe. Se sa ki fe ti moun yo mache dwat.

15. In contrast to whipping a child about the bare legs, slapping is considered brutal. There was an incident in the village in 1998 when a French nurse, scurrying two children out of an area where they were not supposed to be playing, slapped the child of a school supervisor on the side of the head. Within the hour, an outraged crowd of upper-level Jean Rabel school administrators, including the boy's father who had been in an nearby meeting, had gathered outside where the nurse was working. When the nurse tried to leave, they blocked her, harangued her, and ultimately convinced her to settle the issue by permitting the child to slap her in the face. One of the nurse's Haitan coworkers, a man who was also a Jean Rabelien, arrived just in time to witness the nurse being slapped and he entered into what nearly became a badly outnumbered brawl between himself and the crowd of school authorities. The incident continued on the radio with the school supervisor using the nurse's behavior as an example of how offensive foreigners sometimes behave toward Haitians. The French NGO directors were equally outraged by what they saw as a forced and public humiliation of the nurse. There were calls to ministers and much complaining. In the end, the incident passed, nobody lost their jobs, there were no official public reprimands, nor did any apologies come from either side.

# Chapter 15

#  Conjugal Union and the Formation of the Household

## Introduction

It was seen in the previous chapter that labor value of children gives way to a rigid defining of how children are treated and who has control over them. In this way the value of children as contributors to the household labor pool is a primary conditioner of consanguineal and fictive relations—such as godparentage. This important role of children and the institutionalized control over them is embedded in the petty farming and autonomous regional marketing economy seen in earlier chapters, and in the following chapter I show how children free women to engage in marketing. But particular emphasis must first be placed on the household because it is there that children make their primary contributions. In this chapter it will be seen that the indispensable role of children in household production couples with the infrastructural requisites of establishing a household to also determine the rules and expectations associated with conjugal union.

To illustrate the rights and duties that derive from demand control over household production, I draw on interviews with judges, farmers, and actual cases, in addition to survey data. In many instances, decisions made by judges in the Jean Rabel courthouse differ from official Haitian civil law, and in some instances, decisions handed down in the village courthouse differ from the expectations and actual behavior of locals. Child support, for example, is a paternal statutory duty whether the mother and father are married, living together, or not in union at all. Jean Rabel judges recognize this legal duty and even insist that they enforce it. But in practice a Jean Rabel woman rarely summons a man to court for child support and, if she does, the court cannot enforce a decision ordering a man to pay child support (more common are men who summon women to court because they are angry that the woman has assigned paternity, and hence rights of control over a child, to another man). Thus, where official civil law and local legal procedure differ, I have emphasized the local procedure; where local legal procedure and practice differ, I have emphasized the practice. I begin with the definition of a child to show how the status of child and concept of a household and control over production are, in the minds of rural Haitians, inextricably bound.

##  The Definition of a Child

The definition of a child in Jean Rabel reflects labor roles and derives from dependency on and control over the household, the primary and most important regional unit of production. People in Jean Rabel enjoy telling visitors—particularly childless visitors—that an individual remains a child, whatever his age, as long as he has no children himself. But this definition of a child is actually a corollary to another more overarching definition. When pressed on the issue, farmers explain that a person becomes a gran moun (an adult) not when the person becomes a parent but when he or she has ascended to the head of an autonomous homestead by building a house, rearing children, or installing children already born to the couple, to make the house productive. A person with children but still living under the roof of his or her parents does not have primary control over those children: the parents or grandparents own the house and it is they who have control over the young children and their labor activities. For example, as mentioned in the previous chapter, if a woman bears a child while still living in her mother's home, as do most with their first-born, the child's grandmother assumes the role of mother. The child is taught to call her manman (mother), not gran (grandmother), while the mother is called by her first name, as if she were the child's sister. Thus, the status of being an adult is directly related to both having children and owning a homestead. Neither is of any significance without the other. Moreover, as will be seen, the two together are the defining ingredients for a conjugal union between a man and woman; and all taken in sum—house, land, gardens, livestock, the woman who manages and the children who provide the labor that make it productive—that is what comprises a household.

## The Conjugal Contract

There are two forms of conjugal union in Jean Rabel, legal marriage and what is called plasaj, referred to in anthropological terminology as consensual union and in colloquial terminology as common law marriage. Approximately 50 percent of couples in the Jean Rabel Baseline Survey reported being engaged in plasaj unions, with the remaining 50 percent legally married.1 But whether consecrated by ceremony or an unconsecrated consensual union, there are two indispensable ingredients involved in legitimizing a conjugal union: a house and children. Absence of either one means that, while the couple may refer to themselves as in union, a full-blown contractual union does not exist, and neither customary nor legal sanctions apply.

##  Table 15.1: Marriage vs. consensual union (age >15; N=4,927)

##

##  Legal Marriage vs. Plasaj

Married women and women with children have the same strength to fight.2

—(Jean Rabel proverb)

The first woman with whom a man bears children and enters into a plasaj union is typically known as his met (owner). She generally takes priority over any other woman with whom the man may subsequently enter into a union. Should a man who has already entered into a plasaj union and fathered children wish to marry another woman, he must formally cede over the property purchased or worked for the earlier wife or wives (although his and no other children of the woman by other men will inherit the property). After a formal marriage, the legally recognized wife becomes the man's unchallenged met, no matter what her prior status, and she is addressed by the term madanm (as in Mrs.). Only she and her children are entitled to use or inherit property purchased in the husband's name. Should a man purchase land or a house in his own name and allow another woman to reside on that property, the wife has the right to put the other woman out and to have the husband arrested and judged in court. Should a legally married man bear children with another woman, then according to Haitian law only the legal wife can make the children legitimate by adopting them as her own. This statute is meant to protect the property of the man and his legal wife and their children against the proprietary claims of outside women and their children.

But despite the laws and the enthusiasm with which legal wives often describe the dignity of their status as a madanm marie, marriage does not offer the Jean Rabel woman a great deal more security or even prestige than plasaj. No single word clearly distinguishes a married woman from a woman who is in a plasaj union. Both are referred to as madanm (wives). People are expected to address the married woman by the term madanm—as in Madanm Francois—but the same title is also used for a plasaj woman of high status. A married man can be sued by his legal wife for adultery, but only if he has sexual relations with another woman on property his wife is accustomed to visiting. Marriage also confers rights to the wife such as exclusive access to her husband's earnings and possessions, but these rights can and often are circumvented by married men who decide to take a madanm deyo (outside wife).

###  Case #1: Francois Bon-Homme

Francois Bon-Homme, a farmer, lived just outside the village of Jean Rabel. His wife had gone to work in Port-au-Prince with Francois's knowledge and consent, and had been away for over six months. In her absence, Francois entered into a plasaj union with another woman, Venucia, and rented a house for her near the village. The wife heard from a cousin that her husband had put Venucia in a house and so while Francois was away to Cape Haitian, Madanm Francois came back from Port-au-Prince, waited for Venucia to leave the house, and then took the door off the hinges and claimed possession of the house. Venucia sought out the local judge who said he could do nothing if the house was not in Venucia's name and that she would have to wait for the return of Francois. When Francois returned, the judge counseled him to make a new receipt putting the house in Venucia's name. That done, the judge subsequently ordered the wife out of the house.

##  House Building and Ownership

Whether marriage or plasaj, the building of a house is the single most important event that occurs in the legitimization of a conjugal union. A woman not legally married to a man who builds a house for her has nevertheless become the man's madanm (wife) and by moving into the house she has accepted him as her mari (husband). In contrast, a legal marriage or plasaj union in which the husband has not provided a house for the woman is not considered a consummated union. Even marriage, in order to gain legal and social recognition, requires children and a house. The woman may have produced several children with the man, but so long as the man and woman do not reside in a house together, their union does not get the full respect of friends and neighbors, particularly if it is a plasaj union; nor, according to local judges, does the union get respect from the local judiciary system—irrespective of whether or not this is actually codified civil Haitian law.3

###  Case # 2: Ti Frè and Lizanne

Ti Frè, a fisherman, lived in a small seaside hamlet. In 1996 he was twenty-eight years old, married, and had a child. He was also sexually involved with his twenty-one-year-old first cousin and childhood sweetheart, Lizanne, who lived three km from his own home. The mother of Lizanne gave her a small house in the yard where Ti Frè could comfortably sleep over. Lizanne became pregnant and in January 1997 bore a son. Ti Frè financially supported her and the child and he began to spend as much time sleeping with Lizanne in the house her mother gave to her as he did sleeping in his own house with his legal wife. In December 1997, Lizanne bore another child fathered by Ti Frè, a daughter. Ti Frè continued to support her and the children, but in October 1998 he and Lizanne had an argument. Ti Frè spent several weeks avoiding Lizanne and in the meantime Lizanne began to receive frequent visits from another cousin, Pijon—who also had a wife. Ti Frè became jealous, but did nothing against Pijon or Lizanne. People in the village explained that he had no right to intervene as Lizanne lived in her mother's house and could do as she pleased. In a subsequent event, Pijon's wife came to Lizanne's mother's house and cursed Lizanne publicly, standing just outside the fence and screaming accusations that Lizanne was having an affair with Pijon. Lizanne swore it was not true and a year later she continued to insist that she never had an affair with Pijon. She explained confidentially that she had only tolerated Pijon's short visits in order to make Ti Frè jealous (she in fact suspected him of seeing a third woman). Ti Frè, however, refused to believe Lizanne. He quit supporting their two children and moved back to his wife's house full time. Lizanne subsequently left the children with her mother—Ti Fre came and took the son—and migrated to Port-au-Prince where she went to work as a domestic servant.

Once a house has been built, there are inviolable rights and duties associated with the union and they carry the weight of both custom and law. For his part, the man must plant gardens and raise livestock for the household.4 He may come and go as he pleases. He may even take other wives. But under no circumstances may he lead another wife or lover into the yard or share products of the homestead with another woman. Should a man fail to provide for his spouse and children, or at least fail to demonstrate that he is making a serious effort to plant gardens and raise livestock, the woman has the right to cuckold him without being expelled from the house.

###  Case # 3: Marco and Selest

Marco, thirty-two years old, and Selest, twenty-six years old, were in a plasaj union together. They had two children, a seven-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy. Marco took a second wife and began to financially neglect Selest. He allocated to the new wife a garden plot that was previously for Selest. When Selest objected, he beat her. Marco's brothers and even his father tried to intervene, talking to him, trying to get him to return the garden to Selest, but Marco ignored the advice and became increasingly abusive toward Selest, cursing her often and occasionally beating her. Selest subsequently began to have an affair with another man, Anel, and in June 1998, after a fight with Marco, Selest took the two children and went to live in a second unfinished house that Marco had been building for his new wife. In a rage, Marco beat Selest and destroyed the unfinished house, justifying his actions with the accusation of Selest's affair with Anel. Selest went to stay with her mother and, with her family's support, she had Marco summoned to court. In the courtroom, Marco countered that Selest's affair with Anel sacrificed her right to the house. Selest did not deny her affair with Anel. Instead, she pointed to Marco's financial neglect of her as a justification for adultery. Citing the importance of customary law, the judge agreed with Selest, ordered Marco to behave kindly toward his wife, to restore her gardens, to begin supporting her and the children, and he assured Selest that she had a right to live in her original house unmolested by Marco. The judge then sent the couple home to work out their differences.

Marco quit beating Selest but he continued to speak abusively to her and so one day Selest's uncle summoned her and sent her away to Port-de-Paix to stay with a sister. Several days after Selest's departure, Marco was coming home from the market when he was met by Selest's younger brother, the brother's wife, and one of Selest's sisters. The brother greeted Marco and then struck him over the head with a club. The sisters joined in, and together they severely beat Marco with clubs. Marco's skull was split and his collarbone and several ribs were broken. They then tied up their near comatose brother-in-law and sent for the acting local law enforcement official (the kasek) and Marco's family. In a clear acknowledgement of Marco's guilt, only Marco's father came and he made no defense for his son other than to say they should not have beaten him so badly. The brother and sisters then dropped Marco off at the local clinic. After several weeks of convalescence, Marco filed charges against his three assailants. Everyone involved in the incident was summoned to court. The judge, however, was unsympathetic. Citing Marco's abuse and the lack of support from even his own family, the judge ordered the brother-in-law to pay the cost of Marco's medical care and the case was dismissed. In the interim, Marco's second "wife" had taken up residence with another man and Marco returned to his house where Selest was again living with their children. In the fifteen months since the incident took place, Marco has reportedly behaved nicely to his wife.

People in Jean Rabel say gason dwe fe kay, min gason pa gen kay (men have a duty to build houses but they do not own houses). For a woman who has borne children with a man, all the property inside the house, all that is in the yard and all the gardens that men plant for the house belong to the woman. Or, as I will clarify shortly, they belong to the woman in the name of her children. As seen in the case of Marco and Selest above, custom and law reinforce the preeminence of the woman's right to the household. Should a man and woman argue, it is the man who must leave and he takes only his clothes with him—and, as Jean Rabeliens like to joke, his radio, if he has one.

The woman is thought of as the owner of the house, but in return she owes her husband absolute sexual fidelity—an obligation men are not required to reciprocate. She can justifiably violate this rule only if, as in the case of Marco and Selest, her husband is negligent in providing for her and their children. Should a woman whose husband is adequately supporting her have sexual relations with another man, especially on property belonging to her and her husband, she can be legally expelled from the homestead and deprived of her children. On the other hand, if a man is caught in flagrant delecto on property shared by the couple then, in theory, he can be beaten without fear of legal judgment and he can even be made to pay an indemnity. In practice, however, violence between men over women is rare.5

###  Case # 4: Selikè and Marlene

In 1994, Selikè, a mason, was twenty-six years old. His girlfriend, Marlene, was twenty years old, and she was pregnant with their child. For several years, Selikè had been going away for a month at a time to work in Port-au-Prince and he managed to save some money, so he built Marlene a house on property his father had given him and he and Marlene entered into a plasaj union together. The child, a girl, was born in June 1995. For the next four years Selikè continued to migrate to Port-au-Prince for one to several months at a time, working different jobs and supporting his small family. But in September of 1998, while Selikè was away in Port-au-Prince, his father discovered that another man had been sleeping in the house with Marlene. The father sent a message to Port-au-Prince summoning Selikè, who arrived several days later to find Marlene was still on the premises and apparently not intending to leave. Selikè locked himself in the house with his "wife" and beat her. He then sent her back to her parents and entrusted the now three-year-old daughter to his mother. Marlene did not contest Selikè's actions, nor did any of her family members defend her or attempt to claim the daughter. People in the area explained the lack of action on the part of Marlene and her parents as shame and an admission of guilt. Marlene subsequently entered into a public union with her alleged lover.

## The Familial Contract

It is children that solidify a conjugal union and turn the conjugal contract into a familial contract involving not just the husband and wife, but the children as well. Cohabitation before a woman has conceived is rare—as is marriage. In the Polygyny Survey, for example, only five of three hundred women reported moving into a house with a man before becoming either pregnant by the man or bearing a child with him. In the event a man and woman do enter into union and then separate before any children are born, the woman must renounce rights to the house—provided it is on the man's property, as is usually the case (see table 15.2).

##  Table 15.2: Residence patterns

 Note: This land is often purchased from one or the other's family.

All other property is divided equally or according to the original purchaser. After the birth of a child the rules change. Even if a man and woman no longer wish to have sexual relations and separate, everything in and around the house remains with the household. It is in this sense that people in Jean Rabel say that a woman is the owner of the house in the name of her children. The woman is sou dwa pitit li (literally, on the rights of her children), and she has a right to remain in the house undisturbed by her husband or his family so long as she continues to care for the children and so long as she does not openly engage in a relationship with another man. As already mentioned, the man must continue to provide for the household by raising livestock and planting gardens that the wife will harvest, selling the produce in the local market to pay for household subsistence needs and to engage in further marketing activities. If the man fails to plant a garden, the woman may take over this role using his land.

###  Case #5: Renaud and Yoland

Renaud, thirty-two years old, married a twenty-four-year-old woman named Yoland who was pregnant with his child and who had no previous children or previous husband. Renaud already had three children by two other women with whom he continued to have relationships but for whom he had not built houses. Renaud built a house for Yoland on property adjoining his mother's house and adjoining another residence belonging to a sister. He also brought three acres of irrigated land into the marriage. Yoland subsequently bore three children with Renaud, two sons followed by a girl. But in 1980, when the oldest son was only six years old, Renaud boarded a kantè (illegal immigrant boat) and successfully immigrated to the United States. Friends of Yoland saw and visited with Renaud in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, but Renaud himself never responded to messages sent by Yoland. Nor did he send money, and he reportedly took up residence with yet another woman. Yoland, in the meantime, had begun farming the three acres of land by herself. Together with marketing activities and the help of her children she was able to get by financially without the assistance of her husband.

Then, in 1988, eight years after Renaud had left on the kantè, Yoland began having an open relationship with another man, Toma (who also had another wife and family). Yoland's mother-in-law and sister-in-law reacted angrily. They summoned Yoland to court in an attempt to have her expelled from the property. The judge decided in Yoland's favor, citing Renaud's abandonment of Yoland as just cause for her sexual freedom, the presence of Renaud's children as just cause for her to remain on the property, and the absence of children by any other man as lack of cause to expel her from the property. In 1990, however, Yoland became pregnant with Toma's child. For whatever reason, she subsequently ended the relationship with Toma. But, at the same time, growing antagonism from her mother-in-law and sister-in-law and the recognition that her new child would cause her to lose the right, in the eyes of the community, to remain in the house, compelled Yoland to leave. She built another house several kilometers away and continued to farm the three acres that are the inalienable property of her children.

Conclusion

I showed in earlier chapters that a household is the single most important unit of production in Jean Rabel. A household means food and shelter today, tomorrow, next year, and the years after. It is through ownership of a household and the presence of the working children that a man and woman are freed to engage in outside income-generating activities.

In this chapter I showed how the ability to reproduce and control over children give women institutionalized control over the household. The man and the woman aside, there are two ingredients for the formation of a de facto contractually complete conjugal union: a house—which is built by the husband—and children—produced by the woman and fathered, reputedly, by the man. In this way the conjugal contract in Jean Rabel can be thought of as a woman ceding a man partial rights over her reproductive capacity and domestic services in exchange for a house. Men subsequently must plant gardens and tend livestock. Women must subsequently manage the household and sell the garden produce and livestock, the proceeds from which are used to meet household subsistence expenses and to raise the children to the point where they become contributing members of the household. When their husbands are complying with their customary obligations, women are bound to absolute sexual fidelity. On the other hand, a man may engage in union with other women and father "outside" children without losing his rights in the original homestead—so long as he continues to provide financial support. In concluding, these may appear to be unfavorable conditions for women; a woman must abide faithfully by her spouse while men can do as they please. Anthropologists have commented on this and in the following chapter it will be seen that Haiti has often been represented as one of the most repressive countries for women on the planet. But with respect to rural Haiti this is an error. Control over households, obtained through their natural position as mothers, engenders a control over the local economy and individual autonomy that arguably puts women in a position of power superior to their spouses.

## *****

## Notes

1. In a review of the commune of Jean Rabel's birth registry for May 1999, only 27 percent of 469 births were to legally married parents (enfant legitime) and 337 (72%) were born to unmarried parents (enfant natiral). Only 5 (1%) of the 469 children born did not have a man attesting to having fathered the child (deklarasyon mè).

2. Madanm marie ak fi ki gen ti moun gen menm fòs pou goume and alternatively, Fi ki gen pitit ak fi marie se menm bagay: Tou dè gen menm kouray pou goumen.

3. A man who has not built a house for a woman has no recourse to complain should the woman entertain other suitors—her response would likely be, "well build me a house."

4. Harvesting in Jean Rabel is thought of as a woman's right and most women will claim in the name of her children any garden not being planted in the name of another woman, so that even if a man were to attempt to plant a garden independent of his wife—married or plasaj—he must do so secretly for if she gets wind of it she is likely to show up for harvest time and there may be much cursing if he tries to stand in her way.

5. Although it is rare for a man to actually succeed in depriving his wife of her children, farmers and local judges are unanimous in insisting that a man has this right in the event of the woman's sexual infidelity. Also in theory, if a woman should leave the house in anger, she must go stay with her mother-in-law or her husband's otherwise closest relative and if she fails to do so, even if she goes to the house of her own mother, she has, according to local judges, legally committed adultery.

## *****

# Chapter 16

#  Polygyny, Progeny, and Production Introduction

In the preceding chapters I tried to show how the importance of child labor with respect to household livelihood strategies—specifically the negotiation and sharing of access between genders, parents, and friends to control over child labor—conditions childrearing practices, kinship, family patterns, and even gender roles and division of labor. Here I want to bring together the preceding observations to show how it is that these customs and behaviors, as well as the pronatal sociocultural fertility complex seen in chapter 5 and the values associated with the sexual moral economy described in chapter 6 come about, how they are perpetuated, whose interests they serve, and how they relate to the subsistence strategies and the regional economy. I begin with a look at another misunderstood issue in Haiti, female repression; then I use polygyny, an institution considered by many advocates and aid workers to be a defining indicator of female repression but which in Haiti arguably works to the economic advantage of women; and ultimately I show how the importance of household-based production and the child labor upon which it is based mean that middle-aged women play a determinant role in perpetuating the relations of production and reproduction.

##  Another Misrepresentation of Social Life in Rural Haiti: Female Repression

Gender status in Haiti is widely misunderstood. One notable exception notwithstanding (N'zengou-Tayo 1998), most researchers and aid workers who have focused on gender in Haiti highlight the commonality of domestic violence and repression of women. In doing so they cite discriminatory legal codes (Fuller 2005), political violence against women (Fuller 2005), high levels of mortality during birth (World Bank 2002), the feminine struggle for identity manifest in creative literature (Francis 2004), female involvement in onerous, labor-intensive, economic endeavors (Divinski et al. 1998), and even the overall deterioration of economic and political conditions as unfair and repressive to women (UNIFEM 2006). Summarizing these views, the UN's Gender Development Index (GDI) ranks Haiti at the very bottom in the Western hemisphere, making it seem to observers who do not carefully interpret the index that Haiti is the most female repressive country in all of Latin America, indeed the world, being considerably lower in ranking than even Iran or Saudi Arabia (United Nations Development Programme 2006).

Social scientists too have portrayed Haitian culture as strongly patriarchic, male-centered and by implication, female repressive. In a stark misrepresentation of rural life in Haiti first noted by Gerald Murray (1977: 263), the oft-repeated explanation for polygyny is that farmers use "extra" wives to tend additional gardens (Bastien 1961: 142; Courlander 1960: 112; Herskovits 1937; Leyburn 1966: 195; Moral 1961: 175–76; Simpson 1942: 656 ). As seen, this is not now and probably never was true. Women in rural Haiti do not work in gardens on behalf of men. Quite the contrary, rural Haitian women may sometimes work gardens on their own and their children's behalf, but when a man is present, the obligation to plant and weed falls to him. To reverse the situation would be, from the cultural perspective of a rural Haitian, absurd. And oddly enough it is almost a certainty that the cited scholars knew this. Why earlier anthropologists and sociologists said differently I can only surmise is due to Western expectations and the domino-type repetition of one scholar reiterating what was said by another that so often infects our research.1

The point is that, once again, these types of misrepresentations have left a generation of scholars, aid workers, and interested laypeople with an erroneous image of social relations and conditions in rural Haiti. The reality of the situation in rural areas—where 70 percent of the Haitian population live and where we find what Sahlins (1972) called the domestic mode of production (DMP)—is much different. In rural Haiti, it is women who typically have the upper hand in terms of control over the local and domestic economies; who control the household and its products and the money derived from them. Women are also more violent than men both with respect to other women and to their husbands.2

I do not want to be misunderstood on this point. I want to make it emphatically clear that I am not denying the importance of empowering women in Haiti; violence and repression of women in Haitian urban areas is a problem. This is, I believe, a consequence of the extreme differentials in urban income- earning opportunities seen in chapter 10 (table 10.4). My point is that as with so many issues pertaining to life in rural Haiti, information is selectively and erroneously grasped by representatives of aid agencies devoted to a particular objective, consequently distorting ethnographic reality and giving way to misguided and wasteful intervention efforts that do more to convince rural Haitians that "blan" is indeed a little bizarre, than it does to help fight poverty and repression.

##  Definition of Polygyny

Polygyny in Jean Rabel is not legal but it is different from the "extramarital affair" in that (1) it is public, (2) efforts are made to produce children in all of the unions, (3) the man continues to perform his role as provider, planting gardens and tending livestock for all of the women, and (4) the women are expected to remain sexually faithful to the man.3

All Jean Rabeliens recognize the institution of polygyny, and all women engaged in union with a particular man are referred to as his wives (madanm). There are, in fact, three interchangeable terms for women who share a husband—matlot, rival, and koleg—meaning co-wives or co-wife. Co-wives usually live in separate homesteads and the houses of the different wives are usually at least several kilometers one from the other. Among fishermen however, it is not unusual for wives to live in the same small hamlet. In Makab, for example, three fishermen had two or more of their wives living in the hamlet itself. Bokor (healers/shaman) are also an anomaly among polygynous men; they are notorious for having multiple wives living in the same compound and sometimes even in the same household and being able to maintain peace among all of them. The ability of bokor to manage this type of situation is something that even fishermen do not accomplish and that never ceases to amaze other Jean Rabeliens.4

## Frequency of polygyny

At any given time, 11 percent of male Jean Rabel household heads are engaged in a conjugal union with more than one woman (Table 16.1). This may not seem like a large number of men, but with age the likelihood that he is or has been engaged in a polygynous union increases. Forty percent of men over the age of fifty have been polygynous at least once in their lives (table 16.2).5

##  Table 16.1: Polygyny: Opinion Survey

##  Table 16.2: Male age groups by ever been polygynous

##  The Economic Underpinnings of Polygyny

There can be no doubt that polygyny in Jean Rabel is also somehow related to wealth. The vast majority of polygynous men in Jean Rabel have a relatively high level of material resources in comparison to most other men in the commune. A random sample of ten polygynous males taken from the Baseline Survey revealed that seven were skilled workers—in addition to being farmers. Another man from the sample turned out to be a bokor and only two depended exclusively on farming for subsistence and income.

Similarly, in another survey conducted in two different communities, one located in a mountainous area and the other in a lowland area, fourteen of forty-one skilled workers (boss) reported having more than one wife (33%). A sample of sixteen bokor in the same regions revealed that seven (44%) were polygynous and of fifteen male school teachers, four (27%) were polygynous. Fishermen, who as discussed earlier earn as great or greater income than a boss, appear to display the highest rates of polygyny: fifteen of twenty-four fishermen in Makab (62%) reported having more than one wife. Farmers with relatively large landholdings also display a tendency to have multiple wives. When informants in three separate communities, two lowland communities and one mountain community, were asked to list the ten most productive local farmers who were engaged exclusively in farming without practicing any other income-generating activity, six out of a total of thirty (or 20%) were found to be polygynous (see table 16.3).6

##  Table 16.3: Male high income groups by ever been polygynous

##  Female Interest in Male Wealth

It is clear that male wealth is a primary determinant of polygyny but this does not necessarily mean that polygyny is an institution that favors men. Nor does it mean that women passively enter relationships of acquiescence and servitude. In order to understand the role of male wealth it helps to return to the sexual moral economy discussed earlier.

As seen in chapter 6 women are very much interested in the wealth a man has to offer. In what Richman (2003: 123) called "gendered capital" and Lowenthal (1984: 22) called a "field of competition" women in rural Haiti attach a price to their sexual and domestic cooperation. Negotiations begin with courtship and extend throughout a relationship. The building of a house is the single most important event that occurs in the legitimization of a union. A couple may have several children but until the man has provided her with her own house they are not considered in union nor is the woman bound by obligations of fidelity. Even legal marriage is dismissed and legally vacuous if the man has not provided a house for his wife.7

Once a house has been built, the inviolable rights and duties associated with the union begin and they carry the weight of both custom and law. As long as the man is fulfilling his obligations, the woman, on her part, must be faithful. In this way a man's provision of a house, gardens, and animals can be understood as a type of contractual partnership in which in exchange for these material goods a woman cedes her ability to reproduce, the resulting children, and the labor of her and her children. But she is still in control. People in Jean Rabel say gason dwe fe kay, min gason pa gen kay (men have a duty to build houses but they do not have houses). Should a man fail to provide for his spouse and children, the woman has the right to cuckold him without being expelled from the house. The point cannot be understated. For a woman who has borne children with a man, all the property inside the house, all that is in the yard and all the gardens that a man plants and that is not tagged for another woman belong to her, or more specifically, they belong to her in the name of the children she has borne with the man. Custom and law reinforce the preeminence of the woman's right to the household and the associated production. Should a man and woman argue, it is the man who must leave and he takes only his clothes with him—"and his radio," as informants jokingly added, "if he has one."

For outsiders who think that Haitian men can violate these rules by physical intimidation and violence, the reality is usually different. Women in Jean Rabel can be and often are more ferocious than men. They also have their brothers, fathers, and sisters, all of whom will, if it is clear that the woman's rights are being abused by a man, join her in violent confrontation. In seventeen violent incidences I recorded while living in one Jean Rabel community, only four involved men only; eight began with a conflict between a man and a woman. In only three of these cases was the woman slightly injured and in four cases the man was severely beaten; in two he almost died (see endnote 2, this chapter). Women also have recourse to the legal system and judges enforce the rules described.

Thus, women in Jean Rabel tend to be tough and they aggressively assert their control over household expenditures. Husbands who impinge on their wives' sovereignty in the financial sphere are resented if not physically challenged. With this in mind, we can return to the issue of polygyny and whose interest it best serves.

## Economic Independence

While wealth appears to facilitate polygyny, the most important determinant of polygyny is not wealth, per se, but rather whether or not a man has a source of income beyond the control of his first wife. Skilled workers build houses and collect their pay with no participation from their wives. Bokor do not depend on their wives to help serve their clientele. Schoolteachers instruct students and collect their pay independently and fishermen are not dependent on their wives for fishing or even for the sale of fish in the market.8

The most productive male farmers were also found to maintain multiple families, but a closer looks shows that here too the issue is not only the increased wealth of the man, but wealth beyond control of his first wife. A large landowner typically cannot and does not plant all of his land. More often, the man rents and sharecrops parcels of the land to less fortunate individuals, something that allows him to move beyond the influence of, and dependency on, a single wife. In contrast, the average farmer does not have multiple wives. Even men who reported owning irrigated and "fat" land—high-yield garden plots the ownership of even a small parcel of which unquestionably places a household in the category of economically elite farmers—were not found to be unusually polygynous until the amount of their reported landholdings reached levels beyond the control of a single household (see table 16.4). Thus, it appears that men are polygynous when they can get away with it. But again, this does not necessarily mean that polygyny is an institution in the best interest of men, a point evident when I asked them.

##  Table 16.4: Polygynous males by the amount of "fat" and irrigated land owned

##

##  Male Attitudes toward Polygyny

When asked about polygyny, Jean Rabel men revealed a general disdain for the institution. At first glance this appears to be out of sympathy for women. Men commonly said that having more than one wife is immoral and wrong, that polygyny is cruel to the first wife, it causes her to starve herself (bouch li p'ap gou), to become emaciated (l'ap chèch), and sad (l'ap kalkile). When asked what a woman should do in the case that her husband takes another wife, 71 percent of men said the woman should leave him.

But there is more to male opinions than sympathy for the women. Ninety-one percent of men interviewed in the Opinion Survey reported that having multiple wives is a burden. When questioned about the advantages of polygyny, most men were hard-pressed to think of any at all, 95 percent responding that there are no advantages. Typical responses include the following examples:

Ahh, there is no advantage. Men don't understand, it brings you down financially. It's just one little wife who truly pushes you ahead.9 (fifty-year-old father of twelve)

_When you have several wives it is a bunch of work. . . . Right now this morning, if you work this wife's garden, you have to go work the other garden for the other wife._ 10 (seventy-five-year-old father of seven)

_There are no advantages. It is a disadvantage._ 11 (thirty-one-year-old father of five)

_Yes, there are advantages, because there are people who have several wives. But if it is food, or whatever, I don't know_.12 (forty-year-old father of five)

_No there are no advantages. Because you must plant gardens for both of them so you can send them both to the market. There is no advantage._ 13 (fifty-three-year-old father of nine)

So why have more than one wife? In the subsample taken of ten polygynous men, nine of the men explained that having more than one wife serves either to compensate for the absence of the first wife, such as when she is away on marketing trips, or to provide an alternative to spending time with an argumentative first wife. 14

_When your wife is not getting along with you . . . you have somewhere else you can go eat and drink_.15 (fifty-five-year-old father of seventeen)

_If the first one is not good, you have to look for another._ 16 (twenty-nine-year-old father of nine)

_If one wife is not there, the man he goes, he goes to the head of the other house who left a little food for him . . . he goes and eats it. It is this, and after this it is a drain_.17 (forty-five-year-old father of five)

Even then, when men took second wives they rarely left the first one. Only one of the seven polygynous men in the Opinion Survey was no longer with his first wife (see table 16.5).

##  Table 16.5: Men who have ever been polygynous by men who have left their first wife (missing = 16)

In summary, it is not clear why some Jean Rabel men take second and even third or fourth wives. If we base conclusions on what men say, then perhaps the best explanation is because they feel they must, the first wife or wives are not living up to her/their end of the conjugal contract and the man having no means of forcing her to do so. In any case, a more illuminating issue is why women put up with the behavior in the first place.

##  Female Attitudes toward Polygyny

It may seem ironic at first but women expressed a greater tolerance of polygyny than men. As seen, when asked what a woman should do in the event her husband enters into a union with a second wife, 71 percent of men said she should leave him. In contrast, 62 percent of women said that a wife should stay. Only 3 percent of women said the wife had a right to subsequently engage in an affair with another man; 34 percent of men said she had this right (see tables 16.6 and 16.7).

##  Table 16.6: A man takes a second wife, what should the first wife do (missing male responses=15—see text)

##  Table 16.7: A man takes a second wife, may first wife be unfaithful (missing male responses=15)

What seems to be an attitude of passive toleration may arguably be consequences of norms that militate against female infidelity. There are not many choices open to a woman who refuses to accept her husband's taking another wife. She can leave her husband and return to her parent's house, but if she does so she sacrifices her own house and her right to claim support from her husband. If the woman engages in an affair with another man she may be required to give up considerably more than the house and support for, as seen in an earlier chapter, doing so would give the man the right to throw her off the property and keep the children, or at least give them to his mother.

Moreover, no matter how tolerant of polygyny women say they are, the ethnographic reality is that a Jean Rabel woman is likely and even expected to react strongly to her husband taking another spouse. She may go no further than harsh words. But with a woman who is bandi (a scrapper)—as many Jean Rabel women pride themselves on being—violence is common. Displaying little or no aggression toward the husband—indeed, wooing and sweet-talking him in private—a Jean Rabel wife will make violent statements to others of intent to physically attack the other woman. She will curse her in the street and in the market. It is not unusual for this wife to go to the other woman's house and stand outside screaming insults at her. She may stalk her. She may wait at crossroads and on paths to ambush and beat her. She may throw rocks at her, scratch her, or try to bite the other woman's lip in order to disfigure her face.

So it might be said that women are pushed into a situation where they have little choice but to conform to their husband's philandering. When a man is no longer economically dependent on the labor contributions of his first wife there is a great probability that he may enter into conjugal union with another woman and take on a second family. In this way it does appear that women are repressed victims of a patriarchal familial system. However, there is another side to it: Men need women more than vice versa.

## The Need for a Wife

In contrast to women who fight other women for access to male resources and who sometimes are behind violent attacks on negligent spouses or fathers of their children, Jean Rabel men rarely fight or even argue over lovers or potential spouses; and it is not because they do not want a wife. The importance of a wife cannot be gainsaid. Entering union with a woman means a man can establish a homestead, he becomes a gran moun, an adult, an economically autonomous individual worthy of respect, the head of a household, no longer a dependent, and no longer a child who can be ordered around by older family members. Without a wife none of this is possible. Without a wife a man cannot establish a homestead independent of his parents.

A Jean Rabel man needs a woman. It is a woman who will wash his clothes, make his meals, sell garden produce and livestock, extend the budget by rolling the family savings over in the market, and it is a wife who will bear and raise the children whose labor will bring prosperity and respect to the household. When asked "does a husband need his wife more or is a wife in greater need of her husband?" only 3 percent of men reported a woman needs her husband more; 28 percent reported that a husband is in greater need of his wife—the remaining individuals said that both needed the other equally (see table 16.8).

##  Table 16.8: Who needs the other more, husband or wife?

Thus, to vulgarize the analysis, as, in fact, a Jean Rabelien might do, the simple truths are (1) getting a wife is the most materially rewarding alliance a Jean Rabel man can form with another person and (2) men do not fight over women because they know that what stands between them and a wife is not other men, but their own ability to provide.

Women understand the need men have for a wife, and, like men, they too think that a husband is in greater need of his wife than vice versa. Only 13 percent of women reported that a wife needs her husband more, but 23 percent of women reported that a husband is in greater need of his wife (table 16.8). When asked, "can you get by without your spouse?" 96 percent of men interviewed said no, in comparison to 77 percent of women interviewed who responded no (table 16.9 below).

##  Table 16.9: Could you live without your spouse?

Moreover, women, much more so than men, chose their spouse for material reasons: forty-five of sixty-four men said they chose their spouse because of love; only twenty-seven of sixty-eight women said so. Twenty-six of the sixty-eight women said they chose their spouse because he was a good worker; only one man said so. Thirteen of the sixty-four male respondents said they chose their wife because it was the only one they could find; four of sixty-eight women said so.

##  Table 16.10: Why men versus women chose their spouse (missing=4)

##

##  The Bargaining Stick: Paternity

The de facto gender-power relations and primacy of women in Jean Rabel are expressed most clearly in an ethnographically striking complex of behavior relating to paternity touched on in chapter 6. Unlike women, Jean Rabel men often accept being cuckolded in silent shame, and almost without exception they quietly accept paternity for children commonly known to be sired by other men: 13 percent of men (seven of fifty-two) in Makab had at least one child that their wife told them was their own but who friends and neighbors reported was actually sired and recognized by another man. The couvade, while not of conspicuous importance across the population in a ritual sense, occurs. In the home in which I first lived I once sat and watched as the "wife" lay in a bed rather stoically bearing her fifth child, a child well known to all of us was the biological offspring of a man other than her husband. Meanwhile, her husband—not the father—lay in another bed making a great display of sympathetic pains, moaning and holding his stomach. And in the fictive illness known as perdisyon, the disease seen earlier in which women can carry a fetus for as long as five years, both men and women accepted the disease as legitimate, allowing women to dupe their husbands into accepting paternity for children that do not biologically belong to them and giving men a rationale for accepting paternity.

The reason that men accept paternity, and indeed, the reason that women have the upperhand in the domestic sphere, should be apparent from previous chapters. It is because the children are so valuable and because women bear and control children. Indeed, in paternity cases that make it to court, it is overwhelmingly men complaining that the wife has assigned paternity to one or more other men, meaning that he must share control over the child. As for women, they are less concerned about the husband than the money he provides. Going back to the issue of polygyny, when asked to explain why they do not agree with the prospect of having a koleg,

_I am gonna be angry because I will lose some of what he gives me._ 18 (thirty-five-year-old mother of four)

_I will start stashing my money because he is going to be carrying it away._ 19 (thirty-year-old mother of two)

_I am not going to be comfortable because he is going to be giving the other woman money_.20 (thirty-three-year-old mother of eight)

_I am gonna cuss him because he is going to make me lose money.21_ (twenty-seven-year-old mother of three)

But the fact is that the average wife of the average husband in Jean Rabel is not especially worried about the prospect of their husband entering into a union with another woman. Going back to the greater female vs. male tolerance of polygyny, the common response women gave to, "does your husband have another or other wives?" was not a simple, "No," but rather, "No, he is too poor" (Non, pase li malere). The average farmer's wife knows her husband cannot afford another wife, and perhaps more importantly, she knows he needs her and the children, and this was evident in responses many women gave when asked what they would do in the event their husband took another woman:

_I would talk to him. I would not curse him because if the guy had something, if he had a good paying job, I would raise hell, I would have a serious little chat with him. But the guy has no job, he has no education, he has nothing_.22 (thirty-two-year-old mother of five)

_Ah well, I would not do anything, it is not me who made him do it . . . He'll be back, he'll be sick and to the house he'll be coming. There is not anyone before me. It is me who is first._ 23 (fifty-year-old mother of seven)

_If he finds a woman who is brave, he goes and spends a couple days with her, let him go with the girl because he is not a child, you can't beat him_.24 (thirty-four-year-old mother of three)

_If it is strength he feels, if he feels strong, I won't stop his strength._ 25 (sixty-five-year-old mother of nine)

_I would not do anything. If he listens to me, if I tell him "No, times are not good, you can not have two wives. For example, like today, it is only a single two dollars you have there, and if there are two of us, you can not give us each only a dollar." Ah, he can't do it._ 26 (twenty-seven-year-old mother of five)

_He cannot abandon me completely. He has to come sit there and help me chape [raise] the children_.27 (forty-year-old mother of four)

_Just so long as I have a path to go down I would not pay any attention. I would look after my children. Especially with him, I can't leave him. We are married, I cannot leave him. It is an engagement we have together. I have a bunch of children with him_.28 (sixty-five-year-old mother of nine)

It is here with the women's tolerance of their husbands' infidelity that the argument merits returning to another factor that enters into the decisions made by women regarding the choice of a spouse: male wealth, for it is precisely male wealth that makes polygyny an attractive institution; but for women in pursuit of economic independence achieved throughout childbearing.

##  The Econo-Demographic Underpinnings of Polygyny

Early on in the chapter I examined male wealth from the perspective of men being able to afford the "luxury" of more than one wife. I subsequently presented data that showed that most men thought it was wrong to have more than one wife and that it was not so clear whether or not there were any advantages to having multiple wives. Here I want to present the issue from the perspective of the women to show that in the aggregate, polygyny in Jean Rabel is better understood as in the interest of women rather than men.

To begin with, it was seen that at any given time 11 percent of Jean Rabel men are engaged in union with more than one women and 40 percent will have more than one wife, at least once, at some point in their lives. However, looking at it from the other perspective, polygyny is a far more significant institution for women than it is for men. While 11 percent of men are engaged in polygyny at any given moment, at least twice as many women are engaged in a conjugal union with men who have at least one other wife.

Moreover, the demographic fact is that if conditions in Jean Rabel really compelled farmers to maximize birth rates—i.e., maximize the number of valuable child laborers under her control—then, all things being equal, the best way for a woman to achieve high fertility is within the socioeconomic comfort of an enduring conjugal union with a man who has no other wife and who provides the material support necessary to care for her during pregnancy and while she is breastfeeding infants. But all things are not equal. In Jean Rabel, a highly stable monogamous union would only be possible for a minority of women, because as seen there is a scarcity of eligible bachelors, a scarcity that is financially induced and that has both a physical and an artificial dimension. The "physical" scarcity is a direct consequence of a disproportionate number of men going to the city and overseas, often in search of money so they can find a wife and start a homestead. Male wage migration causes the proportion of males to females in Jean Rabel to drop by 7 to 10 percent for the twenty- to thirty-nine-year age group (see 16.11).29, 30

An "artificial" scarcity of men is caused by the fact that many of the young men who remain in Jean Rabel do not have the money necessary to enter into a union, and to build the house, plant the gardens, and purchase the livestock that, as seen in chapter 15, are necessary to establish a conjugal union. Thus, a typical Jean Rabel man would very much like to have a wife, but for the majority of young men the associated financial demands make it impossible. And so, rather than delay the onset of childbearing while waiting for male age cohorts to come back from the city or to become financially mature at home, many Jean Rabel women enter into unions and begin bearing children with men several years older than themselves, a trend that is evidenced by the fact that 48 percent of women versus 18 percent of men are in union at the age of twenty-four (see table 16.11 below). At least 15 percent of women's first unions are with men who already have a wife.31

##  Table 16.11: Women vs. men in union per five-year age group

##

##  Reproductive Reluctance and the Matriarch

Despite everything seen above, there is one catch: young Jean Rabel women are often not so eager to begin their childbearing career. As was seen in chapter 5, girls pregnant for the first time often disavow their condition right up until the time their bulging stomachs make denial impossible. Others tie ribbons around their stomachs to conceal their condition. Others try to abort pregnancies, taking desperate measures that sometimes end in death. But entrance into a childbearing career is not something that women decide by themselves. Elder women in control of homesteads frame the conditions that make pregnancy likely or, to put it another way, almost impossible to avoid.

In earlier chapters it was shown that children are highly valued and that slightly more than half of all farmers would prefer to have six rather than three children. But when the respondents were broken down by sex and age group, it was overwhelmingly women, and specifically middle-age and elder women, who most favored large numbers of children. Women over fifty were far more inclined than any other male or female age category to choose the couple with six versus three children: Fully 87 percent (twenty of the twenty-three women) chose the couple with six children (see table 13.1). The reasons have to do with the economic benefits that accrue to older women. With greater numbers of children, women begin to plant their own gardens and to raise more animals, activities that free a woman from dependency on men (see table 16.12; see also Schwartz 2000: 153–57). The women who said they could live without a man were precisely those with children in the ages when they made contributions to the household.

##

##  Table 16.12: Women who have gardens by number of children

Equally or more important than livestock and gardens, child labor frees a woman to enter more fully into a career in marketing. A Jean Rabel woman with four to eight children is four times more likely to be engaged in commercial activity than a woman with zero to three children (see table 12.3). Freed by the help of children, the most successful women sometimes build their trade revenue up to several thousand Haitian dollars per month. They buy agricultural land and animals, invest in a wide assortment of business ventures and sometimes even hire men to work gardens for them. Houses that have a woman in her 40s, 50s, and 60s are almost invariably known, not by the husband's name, but by the name of the woman, as in Madam Jean's house, or Lili's place. As women themselves explained:

_What makes me say I can live without a man? What I need to do to come up with a sack of food I can accomplish with my four children_.32 (thirty-year-old mother of four).

_If I have children, I don't need my husband at all. Children, hey! hey! I would like to have ten children. I don't need my husband._ 33 (forty-one-year-old mother of seven).

_Why can I live without a man? I arrive at an age like this. All my affairs are in order. I don't need my husband anymore._ 34 (fifty-six-year-old mother of eight)

But younger women often do not see these advantages. Moreover, the older woman who controls the activities of her nubile daughters is keenly alert not only to the importance of her daughter bearing children relatively early on in life for the sake of the younger woman's household and marketing career but also to the advantages that accrue to herself, as the grandmother.

##  The Matriarchic Market Woman and Grandchildren

Parents, especially mothers, take a keen interest in the suitors of their daughters. At first glance this interest appears to the outsider as a promotion of chastity. "Good girls" do not flirt with men while away from the homestead. Many prenuptial daughters who are not in school do not leave the homestead at all, not for any reason, not even to go for water. Some mothers physically probe their daughters' genitals to see if the hymen has been perforated. Girls who see men in secret may suffer severe whippings at the hands of their mothers. But while parents may appear to be discouraging sexual contact it is actually something quite different.

Prenuptial girls are carefully watched, not with an antagonism toward suitors, something that might thwart the approach of gift-bearing men and potential sires of grandchildren, but with intent to maintain a grip on the girl's flirtations. The girl is severely rebuked for encouraging the interested vakabon but suitors who parents find acceptable are promoted. The daughter, of course, has to consent, but if with the encouragement of her parents she does consent, the man is welcomed. He is invited to the house and in good humor teased for not stopping by more frequently. When he does visit the house he is joked with, fed, given a place to relax, and he is deliberately left alone with the daughter for increasingly lengthy intervals. If all goes well, he may eventually begin sleeping over at the girl's house. The girl is then watched carefully for signs of pregnancy. At the smallest indication that she is pregnant the matwon (mid-wife) or another specialist in these matters is summoned to the house to make a diagnosis, a diagnosis that, as seen in an earlier chapter, often comes up positive even when the girl is not pregnant; i.e., perdisyon. This is also a diagnosis that for several years tags the next child born to the woman as the offspring of that particular man, whether or not she is still in union with the man, and whether or not she continues to have sexual relations with him—unless a more eligible man comes along, in which case the perdisyon may pass to spontaneous abortion or the girl and her mother may profit from the opportunity to assign multiple fathers, one secret and one public. It is also worth emphasizing however, that the man, his parents, and other family members will spend more time thinking about the joy and benefits of acquiring a new family member than they will dwelling on the question of whether the child is really a biological relative.

##  Table 16.13: Union type by household residents under thirty years old (but over fourteen) who are not the head or spouse of head

Everyone, especially the mother's mother, is able to benefit. As seen in an earlier chapter, in the event a daughter becomes pregnant while living in mother's home, it is her mother, the child's grandmother, who assumes the role of mother. While the real mother only breastfeeds the child or does mundane tasks such as cleaning up after him, the grandmother refers to the child as her own. The child is taught to call her manman (mother), not gran (grandmother), while the mother is called by her first name as if she were the child's sister. Even after the mother has moved out to plase with a man, the grandmother often keeps the grandchild or several of the grandchildren.35

I want to make clear that the concern parents display regarding the sexual activities of their daughters and the emphasis I have put on the economic aspects of paternity should not be interpreted as intrusive or even unusual. Like parents elsewhere in the world, parents in Jean Rabel want their daughters to make practical decisions regarding mates, and they encourage them to bear children with men who can support the young women economically and who will help pay for the cost to chape offspring. Moreover, as seen in chapter 13, daughters are a critical source of labor for the household. They tend to be the most productive, they can take over the role of mother, and both mothers and fathers significantly favor daughters over sons. A daughter's pregnancy represents a critical disruption in her life in that it reduces her labor contributions to the household. Yet, 49 percent (1,046 of 2,135) of women over fourteen but under thirty years of age and still living in their mother's home had born at least one child (figure 16.1); and twenty-two percent (237 of 1,078) of young women under the age of thirty who were reported during the baseline as being in the formative phase of a conjugal union—meaning they identified themselves as being in union with a man but had not yet acquired an independent homestead—were in fact still living in the home of their mother, father, or another relative (table 16.13). It is at this juncture that parents, particularly mothers, play a determining role in polygyny. As a civil judge in Jean Rabel explained:

_A lot of the time it is the parents themselves who plase girls. Sometimes the parents, they are so interested in money, their daughter loves a young man who is the same age as her, they could marry, but the parents don't accept it. They see that at that time in the young man's life he can not do anything. He cannot give money. Then the parents see by the way the girl is acting that she is going to plase with a married man. But the fact that the married man can give money causes them to close their eyes so the daughter can take the money from him. It is like this. Adults are behind it._ 36 (Civil judge in Jean Rabel)

##  Figure 16.1: Children under thirty years old (but over fourteen), who have children of their own but still living in parent's household (N = 2,135)

Heads together the time has already arrived

Hand in hand until the time arrives

My mother sent me to the river (to get water)

In broad daylight, this man came to bluff me

My mother sent me to get water and told me to hurry

The man came to fool me, he said

Sweetheart, I will give you a gold chain but you must not tell your mother so

Sweetheart, I will give you a gold ring but you must not tell your mother so

And so I said to him,

Sweetheart, if you give me a gold chain I must tell my mother so

Sweetheart, if you give me a gold ring I must tell my mother so

******

Tet ansanm lè a deja rive

Min dans la min jiskaskè lè a rive

Se nan dlo maman-m voye mwen

La jounen myseu sa vin pou-l blofe-m

Se nan dlo maman-m voye m byen prese

Myseu vin pou chaba-m

Ti cheri, m-ap f-o kado yon chen an lò fo-k ou pa di maman ou sa

Ti cheri, m-a p f-o kado yon bag an lò fo-k ou pa di maman ou sa

Ti cheri, si ou fe-m kado yon chen an lò fo-k mwen ka di maman-m sa

Ti cheri, si ou fe-m kado yon bag an lò fo-k mwen ka di maman-m sa

Whether the dynamics described above are to be construed as mothers exploiting daughters or as a partnership in the mutual interest of both mother and daughter is a matter of opinion. As seen, daughters revere their mothers, loyalty to mother is among the highest values, and the subsistence alliance between mother and daughter and the role of the mother in guiding a girl's sexual conduct are celebrated in teat songs, as in the following:

## Conclusion

Gender relations in Jean Rabel are not at all what they first seem to be. Men are more dependent on their wives than vice versa. After obtaining a homestead and entering a union, it is the woman who dominates the domestic affairs of the household. Women are more aggressive, they violently attack other women who try to engage in relationships with their husbands, and, while male violence against women does occur, the ethnographic reality is that Jean Rabel women—through their own efforts or a coalition of family members—more often hurt men than vice versa. As for polygyny, men might have the socially condoned option of having multiple wives but many women engage in outside relations, and they most often convince their husbands to accept as their own children sired by other men. Why men accept them is because they too are heavily dependent on the child labor that makes households productive.

As for why men take other wives, and why, if women are so powerful they are able to do so, it was seen that men in Jean Rabel are not really sure. The best answers any of them could come up with had to do with neglect by their first wife. Women, on the other hand, understood very well why they chose their husbands. Whether the man already had a wife or not, the principal reason women gave was to obtain labor, financial support, and children. As one woman explained, "He gives me money for the children, that is what makes me prefer having him around" (twenty-seven-year-old mother of five). 37

It is children and the labor they provide, more than husbands and wives, who are the most important component of household livelihood strategies. And it is here that both an understanding of the superior control of women and the female role in determining polygyny begins to become apparent, for in the gender and age division of labor there is another critically important difference between men and women: by virtue of woman's ability to reproduce, her control over children, and the sharing of that capacity with men, she is able to gain institutionalized control over homesteads.

In conclusion, Jean Rabel women are best viewed not as bearing and rearing large numbers of children primarily to secure economic support from men, but rather as securing economic support from men primarily so they can bear and raise large numbers of children. Were all or even most Jean Rabel women to do otherwise, were they to behave like Hutterites and abide by ideals of chastity and monogamous Western marriage, many would be deprived of their principal avenue to economic autonomy: establishing a household. Jean Rabel women, as is typical of people who live so close to the margin of survival, make no pretensions about the raw material logic of conjugal unions and raising children:

_If a person marries, why does she marry? She does not marry to be a big shot or anything like that. It is so she can have children... Why does a person want children? It is to help...to go to the water...to go get wood_.38 (forty-year-old mother of five)

_What I am telling you is when you are young, you need a husband. What I mean is, if you haven't had children yet. So you can make a child._ 39 (forty-two-year-old mother of three)

And so it all comes back to the prosaic fact that in the harsh and unpredictable environment of rural Haiti, children are extremely useful, a fact echoed in the poignant words of another woman:

_The whole country can be full of money for women. But money is useless, because they will eat it all and take it. One little thing someone does for you because he knows you have no children, it can cost one hundred dollars. . . . In order for money to work you must have children. If you have no one, money can't work for you. Ahh, you can pay people to work. But if it ain't your child they will take all you have. They will load you up with lies. They will load you up with a bunch of things that are no good. But when it's your child, you always succeed_.40 (fifty-three-year-old mother of nine)

## ****

## Notes

1. All the scholars cited in the main text did research touching on the division of labor in rural Haiti.

2. In over four years of following life in Makab, seventeen violent conflicts were documented. In only three of the conflicts did a woman suffer blows from a man and in an equal number of cases a man was beaten by a single woman or a group of women. The most brutal beatings involved women beating men or women and men beating a man on behalf of a woman.

Four of the seventeen conflicts involved men only, and five of the conflicts involved only women. In the eight remaining conflicts the principal combatants were a man and a woman. In three instances the woman was slightly injured. In one instance the fight turned into a small war. In another instance a woman kicked and slapped her drunken ex-lover and physically threw him out of her house. Another incident involved a relatively weak cuckolded man who tried to beat his wife but was hit by a large stick wielded by a neighbor woman who subsequently marched the man off to the police station. In another instance, a man was severely beaten and stabbed by his wife and four sisters-in-law. In another incident a man allegedly struck a woman and was immediately clubbed and kicked nearly to death by about a quarter of the village population.

Here are the most interesting cases, beginning with the oddest: A very aggressive and physically ugly woman aged thirty-two had stripped naked and flaunted herself before her mother-in-law whom she was angry with for having taken a fish given to her by her son—the angry woman's husband. Cursing and parading herself back and forth in front of her mother-in-law, the angry wife stopped, bent over and, slapping her naked buttocks, showed her anus to her offended mother-in-law. The wife's brother-in-law—another son of the now indignant mother-in-law—had been standing by looking on and he attacked his naked, buttock slapping sister-in-law, knocking her to the ground. (The son-in-law/husband was present and also took offense to his wife's behavior but he did not enter into the conflict, maintaining neutrality which is probably all that kept the incident from becoming a brawl between his and his wife's family.)

In five of the cases of physical conflict in the village, several women together, or several women and men, engaged in some configuration of combat. The most severe case occurred in the house in which I had recently been staying. The man's name was Rimmie (not his real name), undisputedly the strongest swimmer and deepest diver in the village. The conflict began over a bicycle. Rimmie had arrived in the village riding the bicycle, which belonged to his other wife—one that did not live in Makab. Two of his daughters, aged seven and eleven, borrowed the bicycle and went for a joy ride, which ended with the seven-year-old screaming and crying with a banged knee. An aunt came along (Rimmie's sister-in-law) and spanked both the girls. She then punctured the front tire of the bicycle with a thorn, making sure there were to be no more joy rides and undoubtedly also intending to make a statement about her feelings toward her brother-in-law's other wife. When Rimmie discovered what had been done, a screaming and shoving match erupted between him and his tire-poking sister-in-law. Being the stronger, Rimmie pushed his sister-in-law down and jumped on top of her. Unfortunately for Rimmie, his estranged wife and three other sisters-in-law had been standing by watching. The first sister-in-law to strike was the youngest, a fourteen-year-old girl, who with both hands lifted a small boulder over her head and hurled it into Rimmie's back. The other two sisters-in-law and the wife followed, slamming rocks into Rimmie's back. Rimmie's children, also witnesses to the unfolding events, danced around spastically in circles, little arms flailing, shrieking hysterically while their aunts and mother stoned their father. The sister-in-law who had originally been attacked managed to stab Rimmie in the cheek with a fork she had been holding, causing blood to pour down his face. My unfortunate friend was eventually saved by a neighbor who entered the fight and shielded Rimmie from his sisters-in-law while other neighbors pulled him to safety.

Another instance occurred on a brisk Sunday morning and it involved Pol, thirties, strong but a heavy drinker and a reputed cat burglar. (On at least two occasions while I was in the village, people awoke to find Pol tiptoeing across the floor of their thatch roofed huts and each time Pol got away by fleeing into the bush.) Pol was in a dispute with a women in her sixties, Maximine, to whom he owed money for rum he had bought from her. Maximine cursed Pol as he walked past her kitchen. Pol replied. More words were exchanged and Pol, who had been drinking kleren (rum), stepped into the kitchen and according to his subsequent assailants, slapped the older woman. It is questionable whether Pol really slapped Maximine because if he did, it was a very stupid thing to do. Pol has only one sister—she is cross eyed. His mother has mental problems, no one is sure who his father is, and Pol, by virtue of his thievery, is a near outcast in the village, albeit a tough one. In contrast, Maximine is a near matriarch. She is a mother of eight, and she lives in the middle of a cluster of houses in which also reside one of her sons and his six children, a brother in-law and his four children, a sister and her nine children, a daughter and her three children. Maximine also has a husband and two grown children living with her in her own house. And most unfortunately for Pol, one of these children, an Amazon-sized twenty-three-year-old daughter, was standing in the kitchen with her mother when Pol entered. She was pounding coffee with a pestle as big as a baseball bat and the first thing to hit Pol was reportedly that pestle. In moments, sons, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and in-laws were kicking, pummeling, and clobbering Pol with whatever object they could find. I was not physically present and have not seen Pol since the incident, but people report he was almost killed.

The male versus female incident mentioned earlier in the main text, the one that became a small war, began when a twenty-year-old man slapped a thirteen year-old girl, thus instigating a battle between two lakous (family compounds). The thirteen year-old girl, Little-Bridget (Ti-Brijet), was filling her water bucket at the village spigot. Hot and thirsty from a just finished soccer game, Little-Demon (Ti-Djab), the obnoxious and insolent younger brother of the buttock-slapper mentioned above, came to get a drink of water. He rudely told Little-Bridget to get out of his way, and Little-Bridget, equally infamous for being insolent, just as rudely told him no. Little-Demon slapped her, knocking her to the ground. Standing only a few feet away was Little-Bridget's comparatively weak eighteen-year-old brother who leapt on Little-Demon, whereupon several other young men entered the fray. The fight might have passed had Little-Bridget's mother not launched a rock into the crowd, hitting yet another young man in the face. Very coincidentally—or perhaps not so coincidentally—the young man who was hit was the deadbeat father of another of the woman's daughters—Little-Bridget's sister. The man had not only neglected to care for the child but shortly after its birth had brought another woman, an outsider from the island of La Tortue, into the village. The new woman was also pregnant and she died giving birth to the child. Virtually everyone who was not immediately related to or good friends with Little-Bridget's mother agreed that she had killed her daughter's rival with sorcery. And now, after years of hushed accusations and seething hatred, Little-Bridget's mother had hit her estranged "son-in-law" in the face with a rock. As the people in the village said, guere pete—war exploded. The son-in-law's family, led by three sisters—three of the same four sisters who had stoned and stabbed Rimmie above—and accompanied by four brothers, bombarded Little-Bridget, her mother, and her two brothers with rocks. Little-Bridget's family did what they could to hold the attackers off, returning fire with stones and hurling threats of sorcery and retribution. But they eventually had to take refuge inside their house. The bombardment went on for some twenty minutes. The doors and shutters of the house were splintered by stones. The family stayed indoors that night. The next morning Little-Bridget's mother tried to pretend as if nothing had happened, coming out of the house, sweeping the yard, and then heading over to the water spigot. No such luck. The oldest sister in the opposing family had assembled a pile of rocks and was waiting. Seeing Little-Bridget's mother, she launched another all-out assault, hitting the older woman several times with rocks. Her sisters and brothers joined her in the attack and together they drove the entire family out of the village. Little-Bridget's mother subsequently secured a police mandate ordering the other family to allow her and her children to live peacefully in the village, but up to this day, three years later, the family has not been able to return.

Carol Anne Truelove, a missionary nurse with thirty years of experience in the region, reports having treated three men versus one woman for severed lips, a distinctively feminine form of retribution in Jean Rabel: biting her adversary on the lip in an effort to disfigure his or her face. The source of fights is almost without exception not that the man has another woman but the division of resources or the perceived loss of money, often after a period of financial familial neglect on the part of the man. Even in the other cases, those not between men and women, typically the source of the conflict is a struggle for financial access to a man. One fight erupted between a mother-in-law and one of her sons' wives over the ownership of a fish the man had caught. Another fight erupted over the presence of three nubile women who were competing for the financial attentions of men in the hamlet. In all but one of the seventeen cases—those involving men and women—the root of the fight was a conflict between men and women over resources.

In Haitian urban areas, domestic violence against women is widespread. I believe this is a consequence of the relative absence of family—parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, and cousins—who can protect or even seek revenge for the woman. I do not believe, nor do my personal experiences suggest, that violence against women occurs in rural areas to anywhere near the same degree. Indeed, as seen, women appear more violent than men. I believe this lower occurrence of domestic violence against women is a consequence of the exact opposite conditions found in the city: (1) women have higher economic status vis-a-vis men than their urban counterparts, and (2) family members are present and they often respond to violence against their daughters, sisters, mothers, and cousins.

Two community focus group studies revealed that men who beat their wives—and get away with it—are not your average male farmer but overwhelmingly men who have a source of income outside of the household mode of production and are wealthy compared to those around them. In one community, two of the four men who reportedly beat their wives were successful bokors, one was an employee for an international development organization and one of the wife beaters was the owner of a US$18,000.00 dump-truck—making him one the richest rural inhabitants in all of Jean Rabel. Carol Ann Truelove, mentioned else where, identified five men in her area who beat their wives. Two are bosses (skilled workers), one is a schoolteacher, one is mentally ill, and only one is a farmer. In short, three of five have income derived from a source completely independent of the household—and one is crazy.

Other stories that relate to domestic violence in rural farming areas include the story of Marco and Selest (given in chapter 15) in which Marco was eventually beaten severely by his wife's sister, her brother, and her brother's wife; and a Mare Rouge woman beaten by her husband and who subsequently repaid the abuse by feigning submission, feeding her husband dinner and then, while he was eating, throwing a pot of scalding water on him. Nobody defended the husband and he reportedly did not beat his wife again—or, at least, not yet. (For a similar discussion of the aggressiveness of rural Haitian women versus men see Murray 1977: 173).

Something that deserves mention here is the practice in rural Haiti of woman eating apart from men. Women typically eat in the kitchen, which is built apart from the house, and men eat at a table in the dining room of the house. Simpson (1942) took this as an indication of repression and surely many contemporary observers make the same assumption—I did. But this is probably a classic case of seeing an alien custom through one's own cultural lens. In developed Western countries, eating meals, particularly dinner, seated at a table in the company of others, has great symbolic value. We "break bread together" and "enjoy the family meal together," and the idea of eating in the kitchen while others are eating in the dining room smacks of discrimination. But in rural Haiti there is little value assigned to sitting around the table. Women make the food and they simply eat it in the kitchen. Why not? Why wait? In a country where most people do not get enough to eat, alone in the kitchen is a good place to be.

3. This description of the defining features of polygyny in Haiti was inspired by Gerald Murray et al. (1998)

4. There was a bokor in Makab with two wives in separate compounds, who both lived in the hamlet, and the bokor had also borne children with a mentally unstable sister of one of the wives. The sister lived in the same compound with the bokor and the wife, and they unashamedly explained the situation as necessary because the sister could not find a spouse with whom to bear children.

5.

##  Table 16.14: Ever-polygynous men in Kinanbwa Haiti

 .

6. Data were gathered on all skilled workers (bosses) in both regions. There were forty-one in all. The argument that fishermen enjoy a higher income level is based on my own experiences and corroborated by data from CARE's 1994 baseline study in the northwest region, which found that fishermen enjoy on average ten times the income of local farmers (1996: 99). This latter observation does not reflect the fact that fisherman also spend much more on equipment, but the point nevertheless stands. Fishermen are relatively wealthier than farmers.

7. The value of a woman's sexuality is so closely linked to material exchange and house building that in cases of rape, marriage between victim and assailant is a possible penalty, particularly if the parties are young and particularly if the man is of higher socioeconomic status. In a case that occurred in a community where I was living, a twenty-five-year-old man was convicted of raping a fourteen-year-old girl. His punishment: to buy the girl a gold chain, earrings, and to promise marriage. The parents took the chain and earrings but citing the man's poverty "that good for nothing cannot provide anything for our child" (sansave sa pa ka regle anyen pou pitit pa nou), they insultingly sent the man a female dog in their daughter's stead. If the man is already married, a financial indemnity is the usual outcome. If the woman is married or in a consensual union with another man, the situation is different, and rare. The rapist is considered to have threatened the continuation of the marriage as the husband may leave his wife. Severity is the rule and the assailant will be going to prison—if the girl's family does not manage to kill him first—and his family will have to pay the woman and her husband a sum that according to local judges may include the loss of all or most of the man's property.

8. Fishermen are typically beset with marketing women whenever they reach shore with a fresh catch, which they sell immediately.

9. Eh, li pa gen avantay. Desann gason pa konprann li desann ou, wi. Se en sel ti madanm ki vreman pouse ou monte.

10. Ah, lè ou gen pliziè madanm, se yon paket afè. . . . Kounye-a maten-a, si ou travay jaden sa pou madanm sa, fo ou travay lòt jaden pou lòt madanm.

11. Li pa gen avantay. Se yon desanvantay.

12. Wi gen avantay paskè gen moun ki gen plizyè madanm. Si se pou manje bagay sa yo m pa konnen.

13. Non, li pa gen avantay. Pasè fo ou ka fe jaden pou tou le dè, fo ou ka voye tou le dè nan mache. Li pa nan avantay.

14. Only one polygynous man gave the expected and long-favored anthropological explanation for polygyny in rural Haiti: that a man can benefit from multiple wives because wives help him with the harvest and sale of garden produce. The man explained,

The advantage is, if you have the means, you work this little garden really hard, if it yields, you are working at the other woman's house on 2 or 4 kawo of land. If this harvest is good too, you have a money advantage. There is an advantage when days are good. But when days are not good, now you don't have jack and you have to give to both of them.

(Avantay li gen ladan, si mwayen pèmet ou, ou travay telman travay ti kawo tè, si li bon, ou travay kay lòt fi-a dè o yon kat kawo tè. Si rekolt la repete, ou gen avantay kob la. Li gen avantay lè jou bagay yo bon. Lè jou pa bon, kounye-a ou sou jak. Bay fo ou bay tou le dè.)

15. Lè moun pa vin alez ave ou . . . ou gen kote ou ka al manje bwe.

16. Si premiè ba ou yon defo, ou oblije chache yon, min se pa avantay li ye.

17. Si gen yon madanm pa te la. Li ale, li ale kay lòt la, li al tet lòt la ki te kite yon ti mòso manje pou li, li al jwenn ni, li al manje li. Se sa, apre de sa se dekouraj. Apre de sa, pa gen avantay.

18. M-ap fache paskè w-ap pedi nan sa l-ap ba ou.

19. Map sere kob mwen paskè lap pran ladan pote li ale.

20. M pap alez paskè lap bay lot fi kob.

21. M-ap joure mari-m paske lap fe-m fe defisi.

22. M-ap pale ave li. M pap joure ave li pase si neg la gen yon bagay, gen yon djob nan min ni, m ka fe yon tenten, m ta ka fe ti dialog ave li. Min neg la pa gen djob nan min, li pa nan fe klas, li pa ka fe anyen.

23. En ben, m pa ka fe anyen, se pa mwen ki fe sa. . . . L-ap vini, l-ap malad, se andedan kay la l-ap vini. Se pa lòt la ki devan. Se mwen k-ap devan.

24 Si li jwenn yon fi ki brav, li al fe 2 jou a li, kite li al a fi akoz se pa ti moun li ye. Ou pa ka kale li.

25. M pa ta di anyen. Si se kouray li santi, si li santi kouray-a, m pap rete lakouraj li la.

26. M pap fe anyen. Si li koute-m, si m di non, moman pa bon li pa ka gen 2 fi. Tank si se jodi-a, se yon sel di goud li jwenn, e si se nou dè, li pa ka ba nou chak sink goud. E li pa kapab.

27. M-ap swiv neg la, paskè m gentan gen pitit ave-li. Li pa ka abandone ni net. Fo-k li vin chita la pou ede-m chape ti moun yo.

28. Depi m gen wout pou pase, m pa okipe-ou. M-ap okipe pitit. Sitel li menm, m pa ka lag-o. Nou marie ansanm, m pa ka lag-o. Se yon angajman nou gen ansanm. M gen ban pitit.

29. The unnaturally higher rates of males in the 50 to 64 year age group is possibly due to women with grown children going to live with the children in urban areas.

30. It makes no sense to a Jean Rabel woman to go live with a man in a house he gives her if the man has no gardens or livestock; nor does it make sense to go live with the man's mother when the girl can more comfortably stay with her own mother who will be happy to have the services of grandchildren. Furthermore, as seen, in the absence of a supportive husband, a Jean Rabel woman can begin bearing children while still living with her parents without suffering shame or ridicule.

31. This is an inference drawn from the gender differences in age at entry into union, the differential rates at which women versus men separate from their first spouse, and the imbalance in the sex ratios (see chapter 5).

32. En ben, ki fe-m ka viv san gason? Sa-m bezwenn m ka leve yon sak manje, se a kat ti moun um m ka rive.

33. Si m gen ti moun m pa bezwenn mari-m menm. Ti moun, hoy, hoy. M ta reme dis pitit, m pa bezwenn mari.

34. Pou ki rezon fe-m ka viv san gason. Ko-m rive nan laj konsa. Tout afe-m mache. M pa bezwenn mari-m anko.

35. The tension between the desire to have a contributing "son-in-law" and the need for grandchildren is manifest in rare but ideologically prominent and widely talked about incidences where impatient parents surprise eligible men copulating with their daughter. In local lore, parents found in such a situation do not run the man off their property with shotgun blasts of rock salt to his disappearing backside as a stereotypical U.S. farming father might be expected to do. That type of violence or even aggressive behavior against male suitors is rare. Instead, in local lore, the ideal Jean Rabel farmer will barricade the man into the house with his daughter, locking the doors and sending for the young man's parents and a pastor. With threats of violence and sorcery, the farmer tries to force the man to marry his daughter.

Two incidences of young men being locked in houses were recorded from reliable informants and I believe these incidences really do occur. But more salient is the ideology or the commonality with which people talk about such incidences. The image of rural parents eagerly waiting to trap a man in their house and force him to marry their daughter is very much a part of Jean Rabel lore. People will say things such as, "yea those people in La Montagne will call the preacher and marry you right there in your shorts" (Y-ap rele pastor epi marie ou nan bout chòt). In an interview with the Jean Rabel judge, he spontaneously began talking about marriages where men in rural areas were forced to marry at midnight and then challenged the legitimacy of the marriages in court. According to the judge, the marriages are not binding (but I have to add, midnight marriages probably never occur, people in the area would consider such behavior fit for demons).

36. Gen anpil fwa se parann menm ki plase ti moun yo, ki plase yo. Gen dè fwa parann menm, telman se lajan ki interese-l, pitit fi konn reme avek yon gason ki gen menm laj ave li. Yo te ka marie. Li pa asepte. Pase lè gason sa li we li pa ka fe anyen, li pa ka bay lajan, etsetera. Pi devan li we ajè li pou plase a yon mouchè marie. Min de fe li konn mouchè marie sa ka bay lajan, gen lajan, li femen je-l pou pitit la ka pran lajan nan min zom sa pote ba li. An Ayiti se sa ki genyen kounie-a. Se granmoun kap minnin.

37. L-ap ba-m di goude pou ti moun, se sa k fe m ta reme sa.

38. Si yon moun marie, pou ki sa li marie? Li pa marie ni pou chef ni pou anyen. Se pou li ka fe dè ti moun. . . . En ben, pou kisa yon moun fe ti moun? Se pou li ka ed-o. . . al nan dlo-a . . . al nan bwa.

39. Non. Lè yon moun jenn, bagay sa m-ap di, ou bezwenn yon mari, komsi m di, si ou poko enfante, ou ka enfante yon ti moun.

40. Ou met gen tout peyi se lajan pou danm, lajan se unitil, paskè y-ap manje tout pran ni. Yon ti bagay moun t-ap fe pou ou konsa paskè li konnen ou pa gen pitit, bagay la ka koute ou 100 dola. . . . Pou lajan travay fok se pitit pou ou gen pou travay. Si ou pa gen moun lajan pap travay. AH, ou ka gen moun lajan ap travay, min depi se pa pitit ou y-ap pran tout. Y-ap vin chaje ou ak manti. Y-ap chaje ou anpil bagay ki pa bon. Min lè se pitit ou, ou toujou ap reyisi.

## *****

# Chapter 17

#  Caribbean Family Patterns

## Introduction

In the introductory chapter of this book I pointed out that the anthropology of the Caribbean has been called "the battle ground for competing theories regarding family structure" (D'Amico-Samuels 1988: 785). Anthropologists were confounded by a distinct regional family structure similar to that seen in Jean Rabel—including, late age at marriage, high rates of births to single women, matrifocality, child dispersal, de facto polygyny, serial monogamy, and severe beting of children. Early scholars dismissed these patterns as "disintegrate" (Simey 1946), "uncivilized" (Matthews 1953: 302), "normless," "distorted" (see Smith 1996: 35, 54), "promiscuous," and "dysfunctional" (see Smith and Mosby 2003). Subsequently, no comprehensive and satisfactory explanation for the patterns was ever achieved.

In this chapter I revisit the literature and illustrate how the same patterns seen in Jean Rabel can be identified elsewhere in the Caribbean ethnographic record and can be explained with similar arguments, most importantly the value of the household in surviving a harsh natural and economic environment; the role of women as managers of these households; and the role of children as laborers in making them productive. It is this later point, the economic utility of even very young children—a point I demonstrated that many scholars documented but largely neglected and even denied—that completes the insights other scholars have made and makes Caribbean family patterns logical. In reinserting the importance of children into the analysis I believe that I can explain Caribbean family patterns as a logical outcome of the basic material challenges that face impoverished people of the region.

##  Dysfunctional Family Patterns

One of the patterns that most concerned and perplexed scholars was a seemingly contradictory complex of behaviors toward reproduction. Girls were kept in the dark about the processes of how pregnancy happens. Two-thirds of Blake's (1961) ninety-nine female Jamaican respondents said they knew "nothing" of sexual relations and pregnancy before their first union. Typical were women who said, "Me did know that boy and girl can do it. But I didn't know you would have baby" (Blake 1961: 52) and, "when I find myself with a child I never know what happen" (Blake 1961: 53). Young female Barbadians that Greenfield (1966) interviewed complained that "repeated admonitions about 'staying away from boys' never included a discussion of 'what to stay away from'" (Greenfield 1966: 109); many of the girls "were angry at their mother for not preparing them for motherhood" (Greenfield 1966: 109).

In contrast to the treatment of daughters—and similar to what was seen in Jean Rabel—Caribbean parents did nothing to punish the sexual aggressiveness of their sons or, for that matter, the sexual aggressiveness of men who seduced their daughters. Indeed, they encouraged it. As Wilson (1969: 71) noted early on, "almost every ethnographical report from the Caribbean mentions a double standard of sexual morality." In Jamaica, "the proof of a man's maleness is the impregnation of a woman" (Clarke 1966: 96). In Guyana, "for a man to have children all about is a matter of pride" (R. T. Smith 1956: 141). In Andros Island "boys are like dogs"; they are expected to have sex; if they don't they are "sissy;" and "in order to attain adult status a man must have premarital as well as extramarital sex relations" (Otterbein 1966: 67). In Martinique, fathers impress on their sons "expectations of masculinity" (Horowitz 1967: 64). In Trinidad, "It is a glory for a man to dupe a woman into having sexual intercourse with him. If you can't . . . you are not a 'famous man'" (Freilich 1968: 962; see also Clarke 1957: 91, 96; Smith 1956: 141, 1988: 137). The behavior is such that a UN report on the subject concluded that "it is reasonable to argue that in the Caribbean as a whole sexual harassment represents behavior which is largely normalized" (Lewis 2003).

Ignorant of the mechanics of conception and confronted by sexually aggressive males of all ages, young Caribbean women were left defenseless in preventing unwanted first pregnancies. For those who might try to "break the vicious circle" (Kerr 1952: 81; see also Freilich 1968: 52), there was censure, ridicule, punishment, and intimidation. Adolescent girls were terrorized with the specter of what could happen if they took contraceptives or resorted to abortion: contraceptive use was considered sinful and associated with physical and mental disorders (Buschkens 1974: 223; Kerr 1952: 25; Cohen 1956). Coitus interruptus was abhorred, as illustrated by Blake's informant who—as we saw in chapter 2—equated it with murder, "it is a sin, because you are destroying your blood, it is like killing a child" (Blake 1961: 201).

When young women did get pregnant for the first time, the "almost ritualized" reaction of her mother provided more evidence for those scholars who saw the entire process as dysfunctional (Senior 1991: 76). The discovery was accompanied by violence and quarrelling; and the girl was often thrown out of the house, but then quickly taken back in (for Barbados, see Greenfield 1966 and Handwerker 1989: 62; for Providencia, see Wilson 1961a: 128; for Suriname among the Paramaribo, see Buschkens 1974: 225; for Guyana, see R. T. Smith 1988: 145; and for Jamaican examples, see Kerr 1952). Clarke (1966: 99) described the scenario in Jamaica:

The discovery is greeted with noisy upbraiding, the girl is severely beaten, and in many cases turned out of the house. In the second stage the girl takes refuge with a neighbor or kinswoman. After a period, which may be quite short, the kinsfolk and neighbours intercede with the mother on her behalf, and the girl is taken back into her mother's home for the birth of her child.

It was precisely these types of seemingly contradictory behaviors—keeping girls in the dark about the mechanics of pregnancy, encouraging male sexual aggressiveness, and beating daughters when they did get pregnant—that early scholars were referring to when they described Caribbean family patterns as "dysfunctional." But what I try to show in the rest of this chapter is that in the context of the importance of households, children, and the challenges confronted by impoverished people of the Caribbean, these practices were anything but dysfunctional. On the contrary, the view of them as dysfunctional was the consequence of a presumption by social scientists that children were a material burden. For impoverished people of the Caribbean, quite the opposite was the case. As was seen in Jean Rabel, it was of the greatest importance that a woman have children. In St. Vincent it was believed that a woman who cannot have children is "tragic, sad, and pitiable" and similarly, "a man who could not have children is equally scorned, and his masculinity and virility are called into question" (Gearing 1988: 235). In Jamaica, "a child is God's gift," "nothing should be done to prevent the birth of a child," and "no woman who has not proved that she can bear a child is likely to find a man to be responsible for her" (Clarke 1966: 95–96). In summarizing the results of 1,600 interviews from the extensive Women in the Caribbean project (WICP 1979–1982), Senior (1991: 68) noted that "childless women are scorned," they are "mules" and "beyond the pale of society."

The "dysfunctional" behaviors described above evolved not as an aversion to high fertility, but as a mechanism of guaranteeing it. By keeping young women in the dark about the mechanics of reproduction, making them afraid of birth control, and encouraging male promiscuity, one could argue that impoverished people of the Caribbean, especially mothers, were setting up the conditions that made pregnancy unavoidable. By intentional design or simply the consequences of radical pronatalism, daughters were rendered defenseless against the processes that initiated their reproductive careers. As for the beatings mothers were arguably not punishing daughters so much as they were assuring their control of the newborn child. Indeed, as will be seen, throughout the Caribbean, elder mothers deliberately tried to commandeer the offspring of their nubile daughters. Similar to Jean Rabel, the behavior of parents can ultimately only be understood with respect to dependency on households, female control over those households, and the value of child labor in making the household productive. To begin assessing the pattern, I want to look at how changes in the plantation economy that dominated the region for more than four hundred years gave way to the primacy of the Caribbean household as a unit of production and survival.

##  History: The Plantation Economy and the All-Important Household

Plantations were so much a part of the Caribbean that anthropologist Charles Wagley (1957: 8) defined the region as "plantation America." In the colonial economic heyday of the region, massive importations of labor from Europe and Africa helped make corporate plantation economies such as Haiti and later Jamaica and Barbados the most productive on earth. But in the shadow of the plantation emerged another economy, one based on the household and linked through the internal marking system with it's rotating markets. The system emerged from the corporate platnations money saving tactic of allotting slaves provision grounds where they planted staples for consumption. The slaves also traded the goods in giving birth to rotating daily markets. The Caribbeanist scholar Mintz (1974: 130–55: 1985) called this the "slave proto peasantry" and it gave way to an economy so dynamic that in Jamaica, one-fifth of all the colony's currency was in the hands of slaves (Barickman 1994).

In most of the Caribbean the transition from proto to more developed peasant economy began in the 1830s postemancipation era. Through purchases, squatting, share-cropping, and government land reform programs, the impoverished semi-subsistence market producers acquired more land, the regional rotating market system expanded, and households became an important hedge against starvation, uncertain employment, and the economic vicissitudes of the plantation. As in the colonial times, plantation owners granted or rented workers "provision grounds" encouraging "peasant" production, but Caribbean low-income farming adaptation can be understood not only as a "mode of response" to the plantation system, it can also be understood as a "mode of resistance" as well (Mintz 1974b: 131–56). Not unlike what was seen in Jean Rabel, the household and regional subsistence economy provided a haven from onerous and low-paid plantation labor. In Haiti the process of transition from proto- to full-blown peasant economy began with the 1791 revolution and because the colonial French regime was defeated the transition became more complete.

But for the Caribbean in general, it was with emancipation that the transition began and with it a kind of struggle was born. On the one hand, the plantation economy, although weakened, continued to exist: managers continued to encourage workers to reproduce their own means of existence; they paid meager wages; recruited new migrants from India and Asia; and used vagrancy laws and restricted access to the most productive lands in an effort to force ex-slaves and the newer immigrants to work. On the other, many prospective workers retreated into the regional household-based farm economies. As in the case of Haiti, on some islands the farmers seemed to win with the full-blown "peasant" domination of regional rotating market systems and the near-total disappearance of plantations. But what emerged on most islands was a system where plantations still controlled the best and most productive lands while the impoverished ex-slaves were left with steeply sloped, rocky, and eroded marginal lands upon which they underwrote their own costs of reproduction. They planted survival-oriented crops such as those seen in Jean Rabel (sweet potatoes, yams, manioc, peanuts, millet, taro, and plantains); and they fished, foraged, hunted feral animals, tended their own small stocks of chickens, goats, pigs, cattle, and traded intensely with other households in weekly rotating markets.

Typical was the former British Caribbean, a region that included Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Trinidad and Tobago. As late as 1988, plantations held the best lands while 70 percent of all people lived in rural areas on small plots (Heath 1988: 431; Sahlins 1972; Beckford 1972). The same pattern prevailed throughout the lower Caribbean Basin. Even in cases of Amerindians such as Miskitu in Nicaragua—traditionally dependent on fishing, foraging and swidden agriculture—classic Caribbean household subsistence strategies took hold (Nietschmann 1979). But the growth of the informal household-based economy was tempered by another major demographic trend: male wage migration.1

## Male Wage Migration

Wage migration entered into the plantation versus household equation in a powerful way. Following emancipation in 1838, men in the Lesser Antilles migrated to Trinidad and Guyana to work in sugar cane plantations (Richardson 1975: 395–96). The period between 1880 and 1924 was what Brereton (1989: 101) referred to as "the great age of migration" when men throughout the islands migrated to work on the Panama Canal, first for the French (1880 to 1893) and then for the Americans (1903 to 1914); they built the trans-isthmus railroad (1851 to 1855, 1904 to 1912); they migrated to work in the massive U.S.-engineered fruit empires of Central America (1870s to present), the British sugar empire in Guyana (1800s to 1970s), the originally U.S.-engineered sugar empire of Cuba (1890s to 1950s), the Dominican Republic (1880s to present), and Florida (1960s to present); up until 1924 they migrated to New York and even as far away as Ontario to pick apples. Beginning in the 1940s they went to the oil fields of Maracaibo and refineries of Aruba and Curacao; those from the British Islands went en masse to rebuild Britain after WWII. They migrated to U.S. mining operations throughout the region, such in bauxite mines in Jamaica (1944 to present) and Guyana (1940s to 1970s). During the 1960s and up until the present they continued to travel to England to work in factories, dig tunnels, and lay pipe; to Guyana to work in bauxite mines; to the U.S. and British Virgin Islands to build hotels; and to the United States to work as itinerant agricultural laborers.2

Many if not most of the migration patterns continue and new ones have been added such that Deere et al. (1990) could justifiably write that today the Caribbean exports more of its people than any region on the planet. While the migrants were sometimes women—an increasing phenomenon in recent years (Aymer 1997; Barrow 1997; Springfield 1997; Quinlan 2005)—the vast majority were male. The result was that reproductive-age women remaining on Caribbean home islands often outnumbered men as much as two to one (see table 17.1).

##  Table 17.1: Sex Ratios Commonwealth Caribbean Islands 1881–1960

An integral part of the social pattern that emerged was that men were expected to use migration as a source to underwrite the establishment of a family and homestead. Richardson (1975: 398) would write that in Carriacou "often a young man is not considered an appropriate suitor by parents of a prospective bride unless he has completed a sojourn working overseas"; and in Guyana, R. T. Smith (1956) reported that "if men wanted to fully participate in adult social life they often had to migrate." The outstanding manifestation of this trend was male house building.

Caribbean low-income households may sometimes have passed generation to generation in a matrilineal fashion, as with Solien's (1959) "consanguineal female headed households," but they came into being and only came into being in association with a union between a man and woman. Caribbean men were always the ones who underwrote the construction of the house and they held titular right to the homestead for life. The pattern was so consistent that we can elevate it to the status of a rule: in a review of twenty Caribbean ethnographies for twenty different Caribbean countries, Keith Otterbein (1965) found that in every case for which there was data (fifteen of twenty islands), the primary ingredient for conjugal union was that men provided a house (see also R. T. Smith 1956: 146; M. G. Smith 1961: 465; Philpott 1973: 120–21, 142; Sutton and Makiesky-Barrow 1970: 310).

Thus, what anthropologists found when they began studying family patterns in the mid 20th century was the consequence of over 150 years of adaptation to the weakening of the plantation economy, the importance of the household in surviving a harsh natural and economic environment, and the importance of male wage migration as a means to financially underwrite the household. These are points upon which anthropologists have always agreed. After all, it was not an argument; it was a description of Caribbean island economies. After that point, however, consensus crumbled such that social scientists were never able to agree on the determinants of Caribbean conjugal patterns and kinship.

I believe that I can show why scholars never agreed—and in the final chapter of this book I attempt to do so—but for the remainder of this chapter I want to show how seemingly dysfunctional behaviors such as keeping girls ignorant of the mechanics of pregnancy, encouraging male sexual aggressiveness, and ritual daughter beating, are linked to the plantation-peasant-migration economy, specfically through the critical role of children labor. The important thing is to keep our eye on the household. But in doing so, in showing the causal connection between the Caribbean household and the value of children in making it productive and family, courtship, and childrearing practices, it is also necessary to dispel a series of academic myths that have emerged over the more than fifty years of anthropological study in the region.

##  Matrifocality and the Myth of the Female Bread Winner

Caribbean men have sometimes been portrayed in the literature as failures (Blackwood 2005: 8–9); as "victims of their social environment" (Quinlan 2006: 476); as aggressive, sexist, and disrespectful (Lewis 2003); and as feckless and deadbeat fathers (Massiah 1982, 1983; Jackson 1982; Barrow 1986: 162; Brodber 1986: 46; Ho 1999). Certainly there are some Caribbean men, perhaps even many, who neglect their familial responsibilities, and in all fairness to feminist activists, this trend of male irresponsibility has without doubt increased with the recent transformation of the Caribbean economy from one based on traditional household-based subsistence strategies to one oriented toward industry and tourism, a transformation that was occurring precisely at the time that feminist scholars entered into the region (1960s to the present). But for the traditional Caribbean, the conditions were different.

The role of the Caribbean male not only as financier for the construction of homesteads but also as significant source of cash in the growth of the homestead and rearing of children should never have been in doubt. Barrow (1986: 161) found that all her informants "at some stage in their life histories received support from male partners." Senior (1991: 154) noted that "husband/partner is cited most frequently as a source of additional income." But it was much more than "additional income"; in most cases it was the principal source of "income."

Philpott (1973: 143) found that in the two communities he studied, fifty-four of eighty-one (66.8%) of female-headed households depended on remittances that came largely from men. George Cumper (1961) surveyed 1,296 Barbados households (5,364 people; a random sample of 2 percent of the Barbados population). In only two of Cumper's categories of female-headed households (White Collar and Landless Labor) did males contribute less than 50 percent of all income; and in no category of male-headed households did men contribute less than 75 percent of family income.3

Male spouses were important, but in lieu of late age at marriage and even conjugal unions, it was "baby fathers" who stood out most as monetary contributors to household upkeep. In Montserrat, Stuart Philpott (1973) found that fathers of young children in the household sent the most money; this meant fathers who had not yet set up an independent homestead with the mother and therefore the money was being contributed to the grandparents' household. Over 70 percent of female-headed households depended primarily on remittances from the parents of resident grandchildren. Even in male-headed households, 80 percent depended on remittances from parents with resident children in the household (Philpott 1973: 137, 141–42).

The importance of money from baby-fathers was such that a struggle between mothers and girlfriends was common. In Barbados, for example, mothers tried to break up their sons' unions. As one woman recounted to Penn Handwerker (1989: 63):

There is a saying—I've heard it a lot: 'Mothers-in-law break up most marriages.' The mother be tellin' the man he forgettin' her! And the wife be tellin' the man "when you going to grow up and cut the apron strings!"

As in most societies, the man's mother usually lost. Thus, similar to Jean Rabel, Caribbean parents found their interests best focused on daughters. Where scholars measured preference for daughters versus sons, daughters came out way ahead. In Jamaica, for instance, Sergeant and Harris (1992) found that 79 percent of mothers interviewed preferred to give birth to a daughter. As in Jean Rabel, the reason girls were favored was because they were a more dependable source of labor and physical assistance. Also, as in Jean Rabel, daughters were a source of child laborers (i.e., grandchildren), arguably the most important determinant of Caribbean kinship and family patterns. These are points taken up soon. But first, I want to finish with this other important issue, that of money from men, and the fact that the most efficacious way of getting it was via a daughter.

Parents, especially mothers, took a keen interest in prospective sexual partners of their daughters. Parents in Jamaica instructed the girl to, "tell her mother of his advances . . . he will then be investigated . . . and subsequently either be accepted or rejected" (Blake 1961: 69). In Barbados, men were selected at "meet-hims," church socials where parents could censor suitors. Upon approval, they subsequently had sex in the girl's home (Handwerker 1989: 62). Similarly, according to M. G. Smith, "Under the Carriacou regulation of mating, young girls may not reply to the addresses of their suitors without the permission of their parents or household heads" (M. G. Smith 1961: 468).

So important were financial contributions from men that there emerged what appeared to outsiders a type of institutionalized prostitution. As in Jean Rabel, women and their families conceptualized female sexuality as a commodity and were unwilling to allow daughters to engage in even casual relationships with men who could not afford to give them money or material gifts (Handwerker 1993: 45; 1989: 77,87; Hill, 1977: 279–80, 282, 305; Ashcraft 1968: 67-68; Freilich 1968: 52; Otterbein 1966: 105; M. G. Smith, 1962: 93,110–22, 226, 234–35; Stycos and Back 1964: 161).

The material demand attached to a girl's sexual acquiescence often meant that girls engaged in their first relationship with older men. Blake found that in her sample of sixty-five Jamaican women, at least ten of the first female sexual experiences were with a man from five to fifteen years older than the girl; in an additional eight cases the man was at least fifteen to twenty years older; and in thirteen cases Blake could not ascertain the age difference but nevertheless, "whereas for instance, she was only 14 or 15," the man was "already trained in a trade," "an itinerant laborer," "domiciled with another woman," "had many women," "and so on" (Blake 1961: 90–91). The pattern prevailed throughout the Caribbean, where men were on average six years older than their spouses (Roberts, 1957: 206–7; Massiah 1983).

On the other side of the equation, if men wanted to enter into relations with a woman or, as seen earlier, to establish a homestead with a woman, they had to find money. To do so they fished, raised animals, foraged, cultivated agricultural plots, built houses, and pursued virtually any gainful opportunity available to them. But as seen, wage migration presented itself as a fast way to bypass poverty on home islands and obtain the money to build a house and begin raising a family. Parents were primary agents in making this a norm; they often refused to allow their daughters to go with men who had not yet been abroad (R. T. Smith 1953: 108; see also Hill 1977: 281; Philpott 1973: 120–21; Ashcraft 1968: 67–68; M. G. Smith 1961, 1962: 113, 117; Wilson 1961b; Otterbein 1965; Kundstadter, 1963). And so, as seen, men migrated. They migrated such that by the latter 20th century Aaron Segal (1987: 44) could describe the Caribbean as having "borne the deepest and most continuous impact from international migration of any region in the world."

Thus, the reluctance to tell daughters or younger counterparts about the mechanics of pregnancy, the lack of censure of sexually aggressive males, and the beatings upon discovery of a first pregnancy and even male migration itself were arguably related to financial contributions from men. Children were an indispensable part of the equation in that it was the birth of a child that assured the continued flow of money. Suggestions of "secrecy" aside (Handwerker 1989: 62), parents were fully aware of what to expect when they allowed men to hang around their daughter: according to Senior (1991: 75), "pregnancy is expected." A Vincentian woman in her mid-thirties recalled, "'the fella went home and speak with them so they expect anything. Because if somebody come home and you allow that child to go out with that person, you expect anything to happen" (Senior 1991: 75). "In other words," Senior clarifies, "if they allow the girl to go out with a boy they are tacitly acknowledging that she is a woman and ripe for womanly experience" (Senior 1991: 75).

Parents allowed girls to go out with specific suitors, but as seen, they did so with an eye toward his ability to provide. When girls did get pregnant, the parents, especially mothers, wanted to know who was responsible so they could demand support. Senior (1991) found that among the 1,600 WICP informants, it was the "greatest disgrace" that a father could not be named:

It's terrible, one of the worst things in life, it's a shame you having sexual intercourse with so many men and the next thing you get pregnant and you don't know who the father.

Do you know girls like that?

Yes, we have one like that. She has two children and she don't know who the father of both.

So she didn't call any names?

Yes, she called names. Names! A child got to have names. Somebody got to be the father. (Senior 1991: 79)

In effect, one reason mothers beat daughters upon discovery of pregnancy was so the girl would name a father. This tendency fed another anthropological myth, that of the deadbeat Caribbean father. But naming a father was not as difficult as some Caribbeanists have suggested, for, feminist critiques of the traditionally negligent Caribbean male aside, men were eager to claim paternity.

## The Caribbean Father

Caribbean children almost always had fathers. In Andros Island, "most illegitimate children used their putative father's name" (Otterbein 1966: 76). The same was true in Martinique (Horowitz 1967: 56) and St. Lucia (Crowley 1957); and in the Carriacou community, where M. G. Smith (1961: 470) found that out of more than two hundred children, only five had an obscure paternity. In his original formulation of the "matrifocal family," R. T. Smith (1956: 133) too dwelled upon the importance of the father's image; he found it was "inconceivable in British Guyana that a child should be fatherless," children almost always took the surname of their father, even when illegitimate, and "in the overwhelming majority of cases the father is known and recognized by the entire community" (see also Cousins 1935: 47; Cohen 1956: 668; Charbit 1984: 38). Lazarus-Black (2001), the only anthropologist to systematically study paternity suits in the Caribbean, observed only one case in nine years where a man denied paternity in court.

Just as in Jean Rabel, male eagerness to claim paternity and the associated prestige gave women power in that they could decide to which man they would assign paternity (Chevannes 2002). This sometimes gave way to a manipulation of the opportunity to choose who the father was; in Haiti this is known as a kout petit. In the British Caribbean, assigning paternity to a man who is not the biological father is known as "giving a man a jacket." Indeed, some women took the opportunity to assign paternity to two or more fathers, one publicly and the others in secret.

In short, contrary to what has emerged as an almost mythical image of the deadbeat Caribbean father, Caribbean men were often eager to claim paternity. Moreover, while abundant scholarly attention has been devoted to matrifocality, the role of man as underwriter and lifetime member of the household cannot be gainsaid. Otterbein (1965: 75) measured the association between female-headed households and male absenteeism manifest in male skewed sex-ratios and got a .81 correlation. Yves Charbit (1984: 32) got an almost identical correlation with data from surveys done in subsequent decades (.71).

The lessons to be learned are that a male spouse, while perhaps not always present, was the major financial underwriter of the Caribbean household, a household member as well, and if present, was considered the household head. Unless he was dead: when I added widowhood to Charbit's model above, the equation yielded a correlation of .92 (an R square of .84).4 But as will be seen below, none of this is to say that Caribbean women did not play a dominant role in the governing of the homestead.

##  Figure 17.1: Plot of female household heads by sex ratios (Legend: A = 1 observation; B = 2 observations; N = 15)

##

##  Table 17.2: Analysis of variance for "female-headed household by sex-ratios" using Otterbein's (1965: 75) Caribbean data

 \

##  Table 17.3: Analysis of variance "female-headed household by sex-ratio" using Yves Charbit (1984: 32) and adding widowhood ratio from Massiah (1983:19)

##  Autonomous Caribbean Households Controlled by Women and the Importance of Children

It is with women and their role as decision makers in Caribbean households that it becomes clear how and why the value of child labor played a determinant role in Caribbean marriage and kinship patterns. In Anguilla, "the woman is the family manager; she is subordinate to her husband, but not subservient" (Walker 1968: 114); In Guyana, "the mistress of the house receives money and garden produce . . . she is solely responsible for its management once it has been handed over to her" (R. T. Smith 1956: 138). In Barbuda, "within the household, women take over exclusive management. . . . There are no tasks for men within the physical confines of the house" (Berleant-Schiller 1978: 259, 264). In Jamaica, "of most importance to a woman is her own yard" (Durant-Gonzalez 1976: 39). Even in Barbados, where Handwerker drove home the authority of the father, "authority . . . was not accompanied by men's participation in household affairs" (Handwerker 1989: 81). In summary, there really was something going on in terms of the prominence of Caribbean women in the domestic sphere: as a consequence of male migration and de facto absenteeism, women were left in control of households.

On many islands women also controlled local exchange. As in Jean Rabel where the madanm sara and marchann dominated both retail and intermediate exchange, female "higglers" and "hucksters" and small vendors from Jamaica to Guyana dominated both retail marketing of farm produce and much of wholesale interisland trade (Mintz 1955, 1971, 1974; Walker 1968; Pollock 1972; Massiah 1983: 12–17; Griffith 1985; Lagro 1990; Lagro and Plotkin 1990; Mantz 2007). And it is here that we can see the significance of children enter into the equation, for the critical component in the adaptation being described was child labor.

In St. John, "women were able to play such an active role in the extra-domestic activities partly because children were used as labor power as soon as they were old enough" (Olwig, 1985: 118–19). In Jamaica, "children lighten the work of adult women . . . by assisting in the easier tasks such as sweeping, watering the animals, collecting kindling, hauling water, picking fruit from the trees, and going to the neighborhood shop" (Davenport, 1961: 436–37). In Barbuda, "by the time a girl is eleven or twelve she can run a household and often does" (Berleant-Schiller 1978: 259). Even in the case of land-scarce Barbados, "growing children help reduce the woman's work load, and most women are well aware of this fact" (Greenfield 1966: 107).

Female control of the exchange economy was favorable in lieu of male absenteeism and wage migration. But as in Jean Rabel, what underwrote this particular configuration of marketing and male wage migration was the household; women were free to control the local retail marketing economy and men to migrate because membership in a productive household guaranteed their security, and what freed them from the tasks of the household were children and the labor contributions they made. Moreover, as seen in chapter 2, rather than being a commonsensical observation accepted by anthropologists, the importance of child labor to women is perhaps the most overlooked and consistently denied aspect of Caribbean family patterns, one that has led to a misunderstanding of the process. The point is thrown into stark light when one considers another behavior that social scientists considered "maladaptive" and "dysfunctional": violence exercised against children, largely by mothers.

##  Beating the Hell out of Children

As in Jean Rabel, the physical beating of children was common. In Jamaica Clarke (1966: 156) reported, "there was hardly a case where our informant did not expatiate upon what he called the 'floggings' he or she had received in childhood." In Suriname, "No part of a child's body is safe from blows. . . . In some yards it is not uncommon even for older children (especially boys) to be suspended naked by the arms from the branch of a tree and given a thrashing with a stick" (Buschkens 1974: 239). This violence against children has been called "repressive, severe, and abusive" (Leo-Rhynie 1997; Sharpe 1997) and "developmentally inappropriate" (Sloley 1999; see Smith and Mosby 2003 for a summary), but it too was part of adapting to harsh living conditions and it was a direct outgrowth of the critical role of children in household livelihood strategies.

In Curacao, "when a child reaches the age of five or six, parents begin to impose behavior by directing the child's chores and by using a belt or switch" (Hill 1977: 297). In St. Vincent, children are considered to misbehave if they are "lazy and shirk work," they receive "corporal punishment . . . discipline is taken seriously" (Gearing 1988: 194). In Barbados, "as the children grow older they help the mother with many of her duties. By the age of five, children have 'chores,' the neglect of which is punishable by beating" (Greenfield 1966: 107). In Haiti it was seen that the objective was for the child to be "thinking about the switch in everything he does."

In an anthropological projection of Western ideals, the Caribbean father was sometimes depicted as the sterner disciplinarian (Clarke 1966: 107, 159; R. T. Smith 1956: 134; Handwerker 1989: 86). But just as it was women who controlled the homesteads, it was women who most often disciplined children. In the Bahamas, "mothers are often the providers of discipline" (Bethel 1993: 7). Among the Black Carib, "the woman had the responsibility of raising the children, caring for their needs, disciplining them" (Solien 1959: 57). In Anguilla4 "child discipline is in the hands of women" (Walker 1968: 114). In Suriname, "it is chiefly mothers who mete out punishments" (Buschkens 1974: 239). In Guyana, "fathers beat their children very infrequently and certainly much less frequently than do mothers and mother substitutes" (R. T. Smith 1956: 13). In Jamaica, "in all aspects of home training the mother is the principal actor . . . the authority of the mother is never questioned any more than the child's duty of obedience to her" (Clarke 1966: 118–20); and "this part of training is carried out almost exclusively by the mother" (Cohen 1956: 671). In Bermuda, "wives-mothers carry out the most part of the socialization of the children . . . and are also the disciplinarian figures" (Paul 1983: 100).

As the managers of households, women commanded children and they did so with the objective of making the household productive. Similar to Jean Rabel, what underwrote survival was the link between the household, female career as manager of a productive household, and the labor of children. Moreover, just as was seen in Jean Rabel, older women were at the height of their economic power as market women and heads of mature and productive homesteads stocked with working children. It was these older women who had the greatest interest in the reproductive behavior of their nubile daughters and in assuring the replenishment of the household labor supply.

## Older Women

The stability of Caribbean economies and continuation of the homestead depended most heavily on the women who managed them. Because women also often controlled the local retail marketing economy of produce, because this economy was based on household production, and because children were a critical source of labor, they, children, were most critical to women. And they were most critical not as adults, as most researchers addressing the issue have argued (Handwerker 1989: 88; Smith 1962: 236; Otterbein 1963: 170; Philpott 1973: 123; Brittain 1990: 57; Murray 1977); they were most important as children. It is this issue of children that makes the rest of "dysfunctional" Caribbean family patterns understandable. Radical pronatalism, a complex of cultural beliefs and behavior from keeping girls in the dark about the mechanics of pregnancy to sending them off alone or leaving them in the house with sexually aggressive but financially capable older men, the entire complex is ultimately underwritten by the fact that children were not the burdens so often presented in the literature.

Even in the case of the mother's ritual beating upon discovery of a daughter's pregnancy, seen earlier, close examination reveals that what ethnographers where witnessing was more than simply assuring the identification of the father and procurement of child support; it was, as in Jean Rabel, part of an institutionalized struggle between mother and daughter for control over children. In Suriname, Buschkens (1974: 226) wrote of the grandmother's "refusing to part with these grandchildren, which she has come to regard as her property." In Trinidad, there was a custom for the first child of a marriage to "belong to the grandparents," something that Stewart (1973: 98) tells us "ensured the continued membership of young workers in each household" (see also Rodman 1971: 82). While calling the grandmother "ma" or " mama" or "muma," the children were taught to refer to their own mother by her pet name, as if she were another sibling (see Buschkens 1974: 226; Durant-Gonzalez 1976; Greenfield 1966; R. T. Smith 1956: 144–45). In Barbados, if the grandparents fostered the child, the couple was "relieved" of responsibility but they also "relinquished their parental rights" (Handwerker 1989: 63). Even Clarke (1966), who like many of her contemporaries saw children as a burden and the entire institution of high pronatalism, odd marriage patterns, and daughter beating as dysfunctional, went on to explain that, "we found no instance where the grandmother resented the presence of the child in her home . . . they 'gladden the home,' they are a source of companionship, they are useful" (Clarke 1966: 100, 180; see also Cohen 1956: 668; and see Philpott 1973: 140, for bitter competition over possession of children for their labor value).

The benefits that accrued to older women who controlled the process are manifest in the sheer demographic weight of grandchildren. Throughout the Caribbean, young women typically began bearing children while still living in their parents' household; 40 to 75 percent of all births on Caribbean islands are to single women; 25 to 40 percent of children lived in homes where neither parent is present and most of these were homes of grandparents (Philpott 1973: 137; Clarke 1966: 202–4; M. G. Smith 1961: 457,470–71; Cohen 1956: 668). Moreover, while money from men is a preeminent issue, the even greater importance of children is evident in the struggle between mothers and daughters-in-law for support from sons. While mothers tried to break up union and to get support from sons for themselves, it was the mothers of men's children—and the mother's mothers—who most often prevailed. Everywhere in the Caribbean, the value of young children to men and women who shared control over them overrode that of contributions from adult children and sons' loyalty to their own mothers. All of this brings up the question, why did men bother to cooperate with the system in the first place?5

## Why Men Cooperated

One reason why men so readily conformed to demands of females for support was pressure. As seen, women and their families promoted a system in which female sexual acquiescence, motherhood, and domestic servitude were associated with remuneration from males. They selectively encouraged relationships with men who had money; and they attached similar values to male migration, encouraging if not compelling men to go overseas in search of money to invest in homesteads and families back home. And so men migrated; they did so in fantastic numbers; and they did so precisely so that they could give the money to the mothers of their children and invest in households. Those who did not, lost respect (Handwerker 1989: 80); they lost rights to inheritance (Philpott 1973: 127); their wives cuckolded them and assigned paternity for offspring to other men (Otterbein 1966: 70–75, 115); their own children refused to help them (Handwerker 1989: 91); they were censured (Philpott 1973: 178-179); they suffered "ridicule," "isolation" and "abuse" (M. G. Smith 1962: 70; see also Smith 1956: 158; Greenfield 1966: 119; Rodman 1971: 178; Senior 1991: 8).

But male conformance did not derive from pressure alone. Caribbean males had the option of never coming home. When away working as migrants, they could have stayed overseas. And some did. But for the many who returned, the most fundamental reason for conformance was quite simply because investment in a house back home, in the woman who would manage it, and in the children who would make it productive was the best shot most had at dignity, liberty, social security, and financial independence from a system in which corporate plantation enterprises sought to use them at the lowest possible cost. Industrial agriculture, mining, and massive building projects might have paid little, but when men migrated from the poorest regions to distant plantations or construction sites, they were able to save money by sleeping on the sites and bunking in barracks or sharing houses with other men and, in doing so, were able to return home with a sizable savings.6

## Conclusion

Summarizing, while many young Caribbean women may have been reluctant to begin childbearing, the ethnographic record suggests that most often older women—and to a lesser extent their spouses—favored the idea of their daughter's pregnancy and they sought to arrange it so that it would happen with men who could and would provide support. These interests were expressed in the institutionalized complex of behaviors seen above, from encouraging male sexual aggressiveness, to encouraging migration, to keeping young women ignorant of the processes that would allow them to avoid first pregnancies, to censoring financially unsuitable suitors while permitting older, financially capable men to slip through. Moreover, it was precisely the drive to get money from men and male absenteeism that led to rates of illegitimate births as high as 70 percent of all births; it also led to "brittle unions" in the form of polygyny and to serial monogamy; and to the late age at entry into union.

But as we have seen, there was more to it than money. It was ultimately not migration or childsupport in itself that caused "peculiar" Caribbean family patterns. Money from men does not explain why women did not stick by one man, especially if the man was away earning money and sending back remittances. It does not explain why men and women bothered to get married toward the end of their reproductive careers, after all their children were already born. And it does not explain the high birth rates that until recently prevailed throughout the region. The answer to what ultimately drove pronatalism, distinct Caribbean family, kinship, and courting practices, as well as male conformance, and the pursuit of overseas employment to meet financial responsibilities associated with women and children was not money or sex, per se, but rather the same response to poverty seen in Jean Rabel: dependence on a livelihood strategy in which the household was the foundation and child labor the fulcrum point in making the strategy successful. It is also this causal concatenation of variables with the importance of children as labor at the base that explains one of the most counterintuitive phenomena in the demographic literature, why Caribbean women bore more children when there were fewer men present, i.e., fewer men, more babies, the subject of the next chapter.

## *****

## Notes

1. For the transformation of islands from plantation economies to dual plantation/peasant economies, see Mintz 1974, 1985, Scarano 1989, Brereton 1989; for Dominica, see Gardner and Podolefsky 1977; for Martinique, see Baber 1982, Horowitz 1959; for Barbados, see Lowenthal 1957, Henshall 1966; for Carriacou, see Richardson 1975, Heath 1988; for Commonwealth Caribbean, see Heath 1988: 431, Beckford 1972; for St. Vincent, see Rubenstein 1977, Grossman 1997; for Antigua, see Augelli 1953; for Barbuda, see Berleant-Schiller 1978, Gaspar 1991.

2. For Caribbean migration, see Lowenthal and Comitas 1962, Foner and Napoli 1978; Frucht 1968; Crane 1971; Pollock 1972; Palmer 1974; Sutton and Makiesky 1975; Taylor 1976; Hill 1977; Midgett 1977; Green 1979; Rubenstein 1977, 1979; Plummer 1985; Perusek 1984; Pollock 1972; Richardson 1975: 396–98; R. T. Smith 1953: 93; McElroy and Albuquerque 1988; for U.S.-engineered plantations, Balch 1927; Millspaugh 1931; Montague 1966; Williams 1970; Castor 1971; Lundahl 1983; Perusek 1984; Segal, 1975; Saint-Louis 1988; for Jamaica, see Griffith 1985; Pollock 1972.

3. George Cumper (1961) surveyed 1,296 households with 5,364 people (a random sample of 2 percent of the population). Cumper broke his sample into eight occupational groups and male- versus female-headed households. In only two of Cumper's categories of female-headed households (White Collar and Landless Laborer) did males contribute less than 50 percent of all income and among male-headed households in only the category of Domestic Labor (58%) did men contribute less than 75 percent of family income (table 17.4 below).

##  Table 17.4: Percentage of household income from males: Male- vs. female-headed households

4. On average, Caribbean women marry younger and live longer than men. Average age for entry into common law or "consensual union" in the traditional Commonwealth Caribbean occurred at 29.9 for females and 36.4 for males (Roberts 1957; see also Massiah 1983: 14); and Caribbean life expectancy in 1960 was 66.3 for females versus 62.2 for males. These figures mean that compared to men, Caribbean women had 10.6 years more of life after union than their spouse. Congruently, Caribbean households headed by widowed females were high, ranging during the 1960s and 1970s from 11.4 percent in Guyana to 34.1 percent in St. Vincent (Massiah 1983: 19).

5. "These people work abroad for awhile and then return to Anguilla to plant crops, build houses, and work at whatever comes to hand. Lack of opportunities for employment, droughts and the slow pace on the island leads to economic need and a restlessness which results in another trip abroad . . . .

Despite the large disproportion of women on the island the role of the female is quite apparently subordinate to the man. . . . [But] the total responsibility for day-to-day home cooperation, care of financial resources and child discipline is in the hands of women. . . . As one respondent said, 'The woman is the family manager; she is subordinate to her husband, but not subservient'" (Walker 1968: 114).

6. Wages in Haiti or Jamaica at the turn of the 20th century were ten cents per day, one-tenth to one-twentieth the one to two dollars per day workers could make migrating to work the Panama Canal (Petras 1988: 179–80; Plummer 1985; Perusek 1984).

It should also be acknowledged that staying abroad was not always an option. In 1924, a new law cut off immigration to New York; in the 1930s the depression ended migration; in 1937 Cuba, the Batista government brutally rounded up and exported Haitians, and in the same year the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic massacred some twenty thousand of them (Balch 1927; Millspaugh 1931; Montague 1966; Williams 1970; Castor 1971; Lundahl 1983; Perusek 1984; Segal 1975; Saint-Louis 1988).

## *****

# Chapter 18

# Fewer Men, More Babies

## Introduction

It was seen in chapter 2 that Chayanov's 1920s investigation of work regimes and birth rates among Russian small farmers (called "peasants" in the literature) culminated with anthropological studies of the 1960s and 1970s and Caldwell's (1982) theory of wealth flows: when wealth flowed from children to adults, birth rates would be high; when they flowed the other way, they would be low. Most subsequent scholars took a different course, veering away from concrete and measurable explanations. Even Caldwell began to talk of religion and culture as determinants of high fertility. Here I want to show that in one of the most important instances where social scientists tried to stick to a rigorous application of a mechanical model—in this case "the proximate and intermediate determinants of fertility"—the model was inconsistent with ethnographic reality. In doing this, in examining the fewer men, more babies phenomenon, I believe that I can provide a graphic example of the utility of the argument presented in the previous chapter while demonstrating the inapplicability of the "proximate and intermediate determinants of fertility." I believe that I can also show how the tension between the economic value of children to women and men and the need to get children through the critical early years determined the particular values associated with the sexual moral economy in the Caribbean and high birth rates.1

##  Proximate and Intermediate Determinants of Fertility

The first scholars to discuss the "the proximate and intermediate determinants of fertility" were Kingsley Davis and Judith Blake (1956), who identified fourteen determinants. Twenty-seven years later, Bongaarts and Potter (1983: 163–65) reduced the number to nine. The first four were the "proximate" determinants:

1.Fecundity—the ability to have sexual intercourse, the ability to conceive, and the ability to carry pregnancy to term,

2.Exposure to the risk of pregnancy— sexual unions, such as marriage, and the actual time that partners spend together,

3.Birth control methods—contraceptives, sterilization, coitus interruptus,

4.Abortion.

There were five "intermediate determinants" of fertility, those factors by which the "proximate determinants" are altered and that fall soundly in the realm of social behavior:

1.Postpartum taboos—such as sexual abstinence for new mothers,

2.Duration of breast feeding—nursing suppresses ovulation,

3.Delayed marriage—many societies have strong norms against young women engaging in premarital sex,

4.Disruption of union via male out-migration or military service, and

5.Attitudes toward contraceptives and family planning.

Over the ensuing three decades social scientists came to treat the "proximate and intermediate determinants of fertility" as demographic laws. Social scientists working in the Caribbean were no exception, particularly regarding male wage migration and the resulting male absenteeism so widespread in the Caribbean. They frequently assumed and even calculated—without empirical support—the dampening effect that male out-migration supposedly had on birth rates among the women staying behind (Murthy 1973; Blake 1961: 249–50, 1954; see also Denton 1979; Williams et al. 1975; Lowenthal and Comitas 1962: 197; Ibberson 1956: 99; McElroy and Albuquerque 1990; Brockerhoff and Yang 1994).

The problem is that while seemingly obvious, the assumptions underlying the "proximate and intermediate determinants of fertility" were based on Western middle and upper class courtship behavior, where marriage, or at least stable union, was the criterion for sexual reproduction. They do not always apply in other societies; in the impoverished Caribbean, they do not apply at all, as illustrated in the fewer men, more babies phenomenon.

##  Fewer Men, More Babies

Gearing (1988) in Guadeloupe, Marino (1970) in the Commonwealth Caribbean, Guengant (1985: 48, 70, 103) in Montserrat, and Brittain in St. Barthelemy (1990) and again in St. Vincent and the Grenadines (1991a) all demonstrated unequivocal, positive, time-ordered correlations between total fertility rates and migration-induced male absenteeism. In each case, fertility increments closely followed the onset of migration with lags varying from zero to five years. This phenomenon appears even more remarkable when taking into account the degree of male absenteeism; as seen in the previous chapter, male wage migration meant that there were sometimes as many as twice the number of reproductive-aged females versus males on home islands. Yet, women were having more and not fewer babies.2

To understand why, recall that the principal argument in the previous chapter was that children are highly valued for their labor. As in Jean Rabel, desire for many children and grandchildren, the cost of getting them through the early critical ages of childhood (zero to five years), and the scarcity of men caused by both physical migration and financial ineligibility—i.e., those men who did not have money were not considered eligible mates— gave way to a grey area between the ideal demands of monogamous union and matrimony and reality: eligible men were scarce. In resolving the problem, sexual norms regarding marriage were relaxed and parents, especially mothers, and eventually daughters themselves, emphatically linked financial contributions to sexual acquiescence. Thus, the more wealth available to men, the more disposed Caribbean parents, particularly older women, were to permit sexual access to younger women and the more disposed women already engaged in their reproductive career were to acquiesce themselves, providing the impetus that explains why in times of high wage migration, more women among the impoverished Caribbean class bore more children: the simple prosaic fact is that there was more money to meet the demands women and their families attached to sex and procreation and that was necessary to feed and care for a child until he or she became a contributing member of the household.

A look at child nutrition and mortality rates illustrates the gravity of the problem that faced lower-income Caribbean families dependent on child labor. As in Jean Rabel, where malnutrition levels approach 40 percent for children six to seventy-two months of age and 25 percent of children die before they reach five years of age, rearing young children to the ages when they are most likely to survive and when they begin to make contributions to household production was difficult. In 1890 Grenada, for example, half of all infants died before their first birthday; in 1896–1897 Jamaica, 17.6 percent of infants died in the first year of life and 26.8 percent of children died before the age of five; in 1952 Martinique, infant mortality was 23 percent (Brereton 1989: 103). The point is that for obvious reasons money made child survival more probable; money was used to support women during pregnancy, to help account for lost labor of the mother, and to nurture young children through to the ages where they were no longer extremely vulnerable and began to become net producers. And money could most readily be garnered from baby fathers—rather than uncles or grandfathers—because baby fathers were selected precisely for their capacity to provide financial support.

In understanding the importance of investments in young children, Jean Rabel serves as a valuable case where data not available in the past ethnographic record can be partially recovered. I showed in chapter 14 that the value of child labor and the stress that children experience prior to reaching the age where they begin to contribute to the household labor pool is captured in the term chape, a frequently used local term that conceptually integrates both the passage of the vulnerable years of childhood and the entrance into the age of productivity. Chape literally means "to escape," and in this sense connotes the danger that a child passes through early on in life. The child is considered to chape when he or she has passed that point where death from malnutrition is most likely. But it is also at that point in the child's life "when he can do for himself" (li ka fe pou kont li), "when he can wash his own clothes" (lè li ka lave rad pa li), when he can "get by" (lè li ka boukannen),3 "when he can go to the water by himself" (lè li ka al nan dlo pou kont li), and just as importantly, when he or she begins to contribute to the sustenance of the household. Respondents in the 136-household survey of opinions regarding children and household labor tasks explained the process,

_Oh, why does a person have children? You have children. You struggle to chape them. . . . You raise them. They chape. Tomorrow, God willing, if you need a little water, the child can get it for you. If you need a little firewood, he can carry it for you_.4 (fifty-five-year-old father of seventeen)

_I had children, now I have a problem, now the children can solve the problem. Tomorrow, God willing I cannot help myself, it is on the children I will depend. Today I chape them. Tomorrow God willing we struggle with life together._ 5 (forty-one-year-old mother of four)

And to recall women in Jean Rabel commenting on the importance of a husband,

_He gives me money for the children, that is what makes me prefer having him around._ 6 (twenty-seven year-old mother of five)

_What I am telling you is when you are young, you need a husband. What I mean is, if you haven't had children yet. So you can make a child._ 7 (forty-two-year-old mother of three)

_If a person marries, why does she marry? She does not marry to be a big shot or anything like that. It is so she can have children... Why does a person want children? It is to help...to go to the water...to go get wood._ 8 (forty-year-old mother of five)

_He has to come sit there and help me chape the children._ 9 (forty-year-old mother of four)

And once the children are there,

_What makes me say I can live without a man? What I need to do to come up with a sack of food I can accomplish with my four children._ 10 (thirty-year-old mother of four).

_If I have children, I don't need my husband at all. Children, hey! hey! I would like to have ten children. I don't need my husband_.11 (forty-one-year-old mother of seven).

_Why can I live without a man? I arrive at an age like this. All my affairs are in order. I don't need my husband anymore_.12 (fifty-six-year-old mother of eight)

If we accept the argument that children were considered critical to household production, that they were highly desired, that increased availability of money made successful pregnancies and child survival more likely—and women and their families more inclined to accept male consorts—then the question is how were women able to bear more children precisely when there were fewer men. How fertility increased during periods of high male absenteeism was precisely because of the types of conjugal unions seen in the previous chapter, polygyny and unstable unions, behaviors that Bongaarts and Potter (1983) and other researchers posited as lowering the "exposure to the risk of pregnancy," thereby precipitating a drop in number of births (see Wood 1995 for a review of conflict surrounding this issue).

Polygyny, although never legal in the Caribbean, was long identified as part of an informal "standard" whereby married men could assume responsibility for additional common-law wives. In these "extramarital" unions, the women lived in separate homesteads or, in a form not recognized as a consummated union, remained in the homesteads of their parents (known in the anthropology of the Caribbean as a "visiting union"). The men performed as de facto husbands, providing support and fathering children. This nonlegal, or de facto, polygyny made it possible for a greater number of women to gain socially accepted sexual access to and financial support from the fewer available but more financially capable men, thereby overcoming imbalanced sex-ratios caused by male migration (for Haiti, see Herskovits 1937: 114 –15; Simpson 1942: 656; Murray 1977: 263; for Carriacou, see M. G. Smith 1961: 469; 1962: 117–22, 463–65, 1966: xviii; Hill 1977: 281; for the Commonwealth Caribbean, see Otterbein 1965; Marino 1970; Sutton and Makiesky Barrow 1970: 312–13: for Jamaica, see Clarke, 1966; for Trinidad, see Greenfield, 1966; for Providencia, see Wilson 1973: 79; for Belize, see Gonzalez 1969: 49; for St. John, see Olwig 1985: 125; for St. Vincents, see Gearing 1988: 219; for Montserrat, see Philpott 1973: 116, 119; for British Guyana, see R. T. Smith, 1988).

Greater numbers of births during times of male absenteeism were also made possible through a series of relationships, what can be called unstable union. Serial mating, or what is sometimes called serial monogamy (without the emphasis on legal marriage), was socially viable and acceptable in the Caribbean. Women often began childbearing while still living in the home of their parents (see Clarke 1966: 99; Blake 1961; Greenfield 1966; Freilich 1968: 52; Senior 1991); they waited to commit to matrimony until toward the end of their reproductive careers when they were in their thirties and forties (Massiah 1983: 14; Roberts, 1957: 206–7). The trend was manifest in the fact that up until the 1970s, 40 to 75 percent of all Caribbean children were born to unmarried women (Senior 1991: 82; Roberts, 1957: 202); and 50 percent of Caribbean women bore children by two or more partners over the course of their lives (Ebanks et al. 1974; Ebanks 1973; Roberts, 1957).

The extent to which it was in fact polygyny and serial mating that made increased birth rates in the Caribbean possible when fewer men were present is evident in the increasing incidence of illegitimate births during times of heavy male absenteeism, called a Caribbean "structural principle" by Hill (1977: 281; see also Otterbein 1965; M.G. Smith 1962: 117–22; Roberts 1957: 220). The birth histories of individual Caribbean women also demonstrated the relationship. Those women with the highest fertility levels were not, as expected in Bongaarts and Potter's model, those who remained in stable union. Ebanks et al. (1974) in Barbados and Ebanks (1973) in Jamaica found that in contrast to conventional demographic theory, the number of children a woman gave birth to in her lifetime increased with the number of partnerships she had. This was the case even when the researchers controlled for present age, age at entry into first union, age at first pregnancy, time spent within sexual union, time spent outside of union, type of union, and contraceptive use (see also Wilson 1961, for a similar finding in Providencia, and Marino, 1970: 166, who compared age cohorts of women from eight different islands).

## Conclusion

In this and the preceding chapter I have tried to show how Caribbean family patterns were a response to basic economic challenges that confronted impoverished people living in the region. The costs of households and the need for children to make them productive set up conditions that would give way to the familial patterns found in the Caribbean. Both women, parents, and, arguably, men subscribed in principle to elite values of marriage and monogamy. Indeed, in the Caribbean, female participation in the salaried labor force has been correlated with increased marriage rates and lower rates of illegitimacy, i.e., when women have a dependable source of extrahousehold income they marry (Abraham 1993). But it was not historically so easy. As in Jean Rabel, parents, especially mothers, wanted children and grandchildren, indeed needed them to make the household productive. But they wanted—and arguably needed—their daughter to father them with men who could provide income to at least help get the children through the early period of dependency, that critical zero to five years stage before children became contributing members of the household. Moreover, as women advanced in their reproductive careers, they depended on men to underwrite the costs of establishing a new productive homestead and the beginning of their marketing careers.

Thus, as in Jean Rabel, a particular configuration of a sexual moral economy emerged. Mothers tightly controlled daughters. They instilled them with fear of contraception and abortion, kept them in the dark about the mechanics of pregnancy, and monitored their sexual activities. On the other side of the equation, sons were encouraged to be sexually aggressive and ridiculed for not conforming. A man was not a man if he did not have premarital and extramarital sex and his status depended heavily on the number of children he sired. Not warned by mothers, not protected against men with financial resources, daughters were left defenseless against pregnancy.

On the part of males, the scarcity of cash and salaried jobs made it difficult for them to find the means to meet the demands of women and their families and most importantly of all, to finance a household. The primary way men got the money was by migrating. Wage migration became a male determinant of parenthood in much of the Caribbean, a veritable rite of passage. If men wanted to fully participate in adult social life they often had to migrate. But it was emphatically not an issue of men simply seeking the means to meet financial demands attached to sex. And it is here that we come back once again to the other side of the issue, the side often ignored in the literature: the dependency of Caribbean men on women and children, seen earlier; for economic autonomy, dignity, and respect ultimately accrued to impoverished West Indian men only through the co-ownership of the most important means of production and mechanism for survival in the Caribbean, a household.

The frequent absences of men, the increased income of those who were present, and the increased income through remittances from fathers, brothers, sons, and lovers, in combination with pressure from elders and ignorance of the mechanisms of childbirth, meant that many women were more likely not to marry until later in life, to keep options open to them, and to begin or to intensify their childbearing career during times of high male wage migration—when men were scarcer but had greater resources—resulting in the counterintuitive phenomenon of fewer men, more babies discussed in this chapter. When men and women did marry it was to consolidate exclusive ownership, rights to production, and heredity for an already long established and productive household—especially important to a woman in lieu of the probability that her now financially mature husband might engage in extra-marital unions that result in the birth of "outside" children, i.e. polygyny.

Moreover, although it struck most Western observers as bizarre, the fewer-men-more-babies phenomenon may be much more widespread than the Caribbean. Ethnographers in Polynesia (Larson 1981), in Thailand (Kunstadter 1971), in New Guinea (Taufa et al.1990), and in rural Spain (Reher and Iriso-Napal 1989) all found statistically positive relationships between increased birth rates and male absenteeism brought about by wage migration. Researchers analyzing large samples of cross-country data for developing regions have similarly noted that migration delays the transition to lower fertility (Bilsborrow 1987; Bilsborrow and Winegarden 1985); Bongaarts himself noted that in sub-Saharan Africa—an area characterized by high male wage migration—fertility-inhibiting effects expected from migration did not come about, the reasons for which he could only speculate (Bongaarts et al. 1984: 511). Indeed, what perplexed Bongaarts is an old and apparently much forgotten idiosyncrasy that vexed earlier students of the demographic transition. Even Kingsley Davis (1963), the original formulator of the proximate and immediate determinants of fertility and one of the most important demographers of the 20th century, noted that emigration often offset fertility decline (see also Friedlander 1969; Mosher 1980; Moore 1945: 119; Hawley 1950, particularly chapter 9). But as with so many other demographic trends that did not fulfill the expectations of social scientists, this issue of migration offsetting fertility decline was ignored. In the following chapter I want to deal with understanding why.

## *****

## Notes

. The landmark study supporting that migration—and hence male absenteeism— disrupted fertility in Caribbean communities was carried out by McElroy and Albuquerque (1990) who tested data from ten countries in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Using a Spearman's rank-order correlation coefficient, they measured the relationship between out-migration and fertility for the 1960–1965 and the 1965–1970 periods. Their results yielded correlation coefficients of -0.52 and -0.39 (McElroy and Albuuquerque 1990: 792), respectively. Neither of the tests were statistically significant at the 0.05 level, the data nevertheless seemed to indicate that out-migration correlates negatively with fertility decline in Caribbean sending countries—the higher the out-migration the lower the fertility rate. But, rather than demonstrating that male wage migration disrupts fertility, their data can be interpreted as demonstrating the opposite.

First, although their argument that emigration during the 1960s is "dominated by females" (McElroy and Albuquerque cite Marshal, 1985:52), temporary wage migration was clearly dominated by men. Looking at Marino's sex ratio chart (in the main text) it can be seen that out of the ten Caribbean countries for which McElroy and Albuquerque provide data, men were in the minority in all but one; in most of the cases men were outnumbered by reproductive-age females three to two and in some cases there were almost twice as many reproductive-age females as men.

The most significant shortcoming in their argument has to do with attempting to identify the "independent influence of migration" that McElroy and Albuquerque claimed they had isolated (1990: 785). The researchers did not account for other variables affecting fertility, such as wage labor available to women. This neglect is understandable because, as the authors themselves point out, reliable cross-country socioeconomic data for the Caribbean is scarce (McElroy and Albuquerque 1990: 785–86). On the other hand, the failure to exercise socioeconomic controls damages the validity of their argument. And here is why:

Like other areas of the world, the Caribbean during the 1960s was experiencing dramatic socioeconomic changes. Specifically, in the countries included in McElroy and Albuquerque's sample, the percentage of the labor force engaged in agriculture declined by an average of 30 percent; the percentage of population living in urban areas increased by 24 percent; female enrollment in primary school increased by 44 percent; life expectancy increased by an average of 5.1 years; and in most instances, infant mortality declined precipitously—in Grenada, for example, infant mortality declined from 77.9 to 34 deaths per 1,000; all factors known to precipitate or at least be associated fertility transition (Caldwell 1982; Handwerker 1986). And indeed, congruent with changes in living standards and economic conditions, Caribbean Total Fertility Rates declined during this period by an average .351 births per women.

##  Table 18.1: Caribbean net migration by total fertility rate

Because of the dramatic changes in demographic, health, and socioeconomic conditions, the measurement of interest for McElroy and Albuquerque should not have been how much Caribbean out-migration correlated with fertility levels. The relationship that McElroy and Albuquerque should have measured is how much out-migration detracted from or sped Caribbean fertility decline, i.e., the average level of migration correlated with the change in fertility rates. When McElroy and Albuquerque's data is used to plot the changes in TFR (1970 TFR minus 1960 TFR) against the rate of out-migration, a very different picture emerges than that proposed by the researchers.

The amount of reduction in fertility levels for individual Caribbean countries correlated with the average rate of migration for the 1960 to 1970 period indicates an association between small or absent fertility decline and high levels of out-migration (see table 18.2). A Spearman's rank-order correlation coefficient yields a -.340 (without significance below the .05 level). In effect, the higher the migration the lower the fertility decline. When Puerto Rico is excluded from the data set, because it is an outlier and was experiencing large-scale economic and social intervention from the United States during this era, a Spearman's rank-order correlation coefficient takes on the value of -.628 (with significance below the .05 level. Thus, rather than stimulating fertility decline, it could more easily be argued that migration offset fertility decline. Moreover, the studies provided by Marino (1970) and Brittain (1990, 1991a, 1991b) demonstrate that before the onset of rapid fertility decline in the region, there was a correspondence between male absenteeism and increased birth rates.

##  Table 18.2: Correlations in average change in total fertility rate by net migration

2. The fewer men, more babies relationship was also evident in Jean Rabel. With the first coup d'etat (1991) that deposed democratically elected Jean Bertrand Aristide and the ensuing three years of international embargo, the migration of men conspicuously intensified. An unprecedented wave of mostly young males left the area headed for the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Suriname, Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, the United States, and the nearby Bahamas. The migration was such that in 1997, Jean Rabel sex ratios for the twenty- to thirty-four-year age varied from eighty-five to ninety-two males for every one hundred females. Most of these missing men had left home in search of employment so they could remit income primarily to mothers, mothers of their children, wives, and girlfriends. Moreover, using clinic data from the Bon Nouvel Mission (a clinic in Jean Rabel), and comparing that data for the periods before and after 1992 suggests that birth rates during this period markedly increased. Comparing the seven year time period (1985–1992) with the six year time period (1993–1999), there was a 20 percent decrease in contraceptive use from 6.9 percent to 5.5 percent; a two-year decline in mother's age at first birth , from twenty-two to twenty years of age ( P < .05); and a 5.9 month decline in the average length of a woman's first inter-birth interval, from 29.5 to 23.6 months (p > .05 but p < .10).

3. "Lè li ka boukannen" (when he can barbeque) is an expression that derives from children digging up and cooking sweet potatoes, something young children, especially boys, often do, and it signifies a child's ability to look after himself.

4. O, pou ki yon moun fe ti moun? Ke vle di, ou fe ti moun nan. W-ap bat pou chape yo. . . . L-ap grandi yo. L-ap chape. Demen si dieu vle, si ou bezwen ti dlo li ka ba ou. Si ou bezwenn ti bout bwa li ka pote li pou ou. Ou bezwenn ni konn ed.

5. Mwen fe ti moun, kounye-a m vin gen yon pwoblem, kounye-a ti moun ka redi pwoblem. Demen si dieu vle, m vin pa kapab, se sou kont ti moun m-ap vini. Kounye-a map chape yo. Demen si dieu vle yo ka bat ave-m.

6. L-ap ba-m di goude pou ti moun, se sa k fe m ta reme sa

7. Non. Lè yon moun jenn, bagay sa m-ap di, ou bezwenn yon mari, komsi m di, si ou poko enfante, ou ka enfante yon ti moun.

8. Si yon moun marie, pou ki sa li marie? Li pa marie ni pou chef ni pou anyen. Se pou li ka fe dè ti moun. . . . En ben, pou kisa yon moun fe ti moun? Se pou li ka ed-o. . . al nan dlo-a . . . al nan bwa.

9. M-ap swiv neg la, paskè m gentan gen pitit ave-li. Li pa ka abandone ni net. Fo-k li vin chita la pou ede-m chape ti moun yo

10. En ben, ki fe-m ka viv san gason? Sa-m bezwenn m ka leve yon sak manje, se a kat ti moun um m ka rive.

11. Si m gen ti moun m pa bezwenn mari-m menm. Ti moun, hoy, hoy. M ta reme dis pitit, m pa bezwenn mari.

12. Pou ki rezon fe-m ka viv san gason. Ko-m rive nan laj konsa. Tout afe-m mache. M pa bezwenn mari-m anko.

# Chapter 19

#  A Reflexive and Critical Look at the Anthropology of the Caribbean

## Introduction

At the beginning of this book, I showed how researchers and scholars have largely rejected the notion that economic benefits of children among small farmers are a significant determinant of developing country birth rates, kinship, and family and courtship practices. It is a rejection that permeates the literature; one that does not make sense in light of ethnographers' rigorous documentation of the utility of children; and it has impeded an understanding of the determinants of Caribbean familial patterns. But it was not the only misunderstanding of its kind in the literature.

Throughout the book, I touched on a series of other issues where scholars did not accurately appreciate the ethnographic facts. In chapter 8, I showed how estimates of per capita income were misleading and, in the case of Jean Rabel, based on faulty data collection; in chapter 16, I showed how scholars projected repression onto Haitian women when in fact rural Haitian women enjoy a level of economic autonomy that often rivals or exceeds that of their spouses; in chapter 17, I showed how male absenteeism gave way to inconsistent notions of "matrifocality" and how this was generalized to an erroneous conclusion that Caribbean women were financially independent of men; and in the previous chapter I showed how the "proximate and intermediate determinants of fertility" were projected onto the demographic behavior of impoverished Caribbean people when in fact they did not fit.

In addressing these issues and pulling together the work of other researchers I hope that I have shown that the causes of Caribbean family patterns are not complex. They derive from basic economic costs and benefits inherent in household livelihood strategies. Moreover, I am not the first to think so. Anthropologists began focusing on Caribbean family patterns in the 1930s, and among the first of them were scholars like Simpson (1942), who gave candid, economic explanations for Caribbean value systems and family structure, including recognition of the importance of the labor of children to the family. As will be seen in this chapter, others followed. Scholars such as Cohen (1956), Solien de Gonzalez (1961), Kunstadter (1963), and Otterbein (1965) made attempts to explain Caribbean family patterns according to practical material conditions, particularly male financial contributions to housebuilding and the male wage migration so prevalent in the Caribbean. But these explanations and trains of inquiry became overshadowed. A fog of research agendas, convoluted analyses, proposed ideational and cultural causes, and myths increasingly obscured the underlying determinants of Caribbean family structure.

In this chapter I want to present exactly what these research agendas were and I also want to deal with why. Why did researchers come to favor nonexplanatory explanations? I believe that I can demonstrate that the answer is that the research and conclusions were usually steeped in political discourse or government funded campaigns meant, not to understand the behavior of Caribbean people, but to rationalize, manipulate, exploit, or change it.

##  Historical Particularism and Civil Rights

Caribbean family patterns made their first entrance into the mainstream literature when Melville Herskovits—a student of Franz Boas—competed with Franklin Frazier, a sociologist, for what Freilich (1967: 239) called "The Explanation." Echoing sentiments of "separate but equal," Herskovits explained Caribbean family and kinship as reformulated cultural survivals from Africa. Upon visiting Harlem he was impressed by a "teeming center of negro life," complete with "hospitals and the social service agencies . . . lawyers, and doctors and editors and writers . . . capitalists, teachers, and nurses and students," what he called "the same pattern" as white society "only a different shade" (Herskovits 1925: 368; Gambrell 1997:104). As historian David Levering Lewis (1981: 116) quipped, Herskovits' arguments, popular with both white separatists and the wealthy blacks who dominated the NAACP, earned the white Jewish scholar the title "honorary New Negro"—a pun on Herskovits' essay "The New Negro."

Herskovits' nemesis, Franklin Frazier, was an African-American professor of sociology at Howard University and member of the civil rights intelligentsia that came to be known as the Howard Circle. Frazier insisted on the primacy of the slave experience and subsequent discrimination, poverty, and exploitation as determinants of Afroamerican/Caribbean family patterns. He and those close to him viewed Herskovits' arguments as an extension of that discrimination, charging that the ideas he promoted lent credence to white racist arguments, and that wealthy blacks accepted "unconditionally, the values of the white bourgeois world" because "they do not truly identify themselves with Negroes"—one implication being that they benefited from their positions as an intermediate elite negotiating the economic and political divide between whites and blacks (Frazier 1957). Addressing Herskovits in a speech in Harlem, Frazier summed the political implications of the Herskovits position:

_If whites believe that the Negro's social behaviour was rooted in African culture, they would lose whatever sense of guilt they had for keeping the Negro down. Negro crime, for example, could be explained away as an "Africanism" rather than due to inadequate police and court protection_  http://www.nbufront.org/html/FRONTalView/ArticlesPapers/ThurgoodMarshallStamp.html1 (Tauheed 2003)

With the successes of the civil rights movement, the Herskovits-Frazier debate transformed. Afroamericans interested in motivating black ethnicity to politically consolidate power—and who may earlier have stood on the other side of the issue, that of equal rights and universal suffrage—soon embraced Herskovits' ideas. The 1960s was, as Cole (1985: 123) has described it, "the era of African dress, African hairstyles and adoption of African names"; and "The renewed interest in Africanisms . . . was clearly associated with the political climate of the Black Power Movement and the rise of black studies in academic circles" (Cole 1985: 121). The Africanism perspective of Caribbean family patterns continues among those scholars interested in identity (Sutton and Makiesky-Barrow 1975: 297; Crahan et al. 1980; Cole 1985; Barrow 1986; Yelvington 2001). But for most anthropologists, they are no longer of major interest.2

##  Structural Functionalism and Colonial Government Morality Campaigns

Concurrent with and following the Herskovits/Frazier debate—or, perhaps more accurately, the separation versus integration debate—was structural functionalism: a focus on the adaptive interrelations between social institutions. Once again, scholars were embedded in greater econopolitical processes, this one closely linked to colonial efforts to revitalize overseas protectorates through an "organized campaign against the social, moral and economic evils of promiscuity," and endeavor that included massive marriage campaigns (M. G. Smith 1957: iv). Among the leading structural-functionalists in the Caribbean were Edith Clarke—anthropologist, politician, and Jamaican aristocrat—and M. G. Smith—another Jamaican-born, English-educated aristocrat-anthropologist. Both Smith's and Clarke's viewpoints harked back to the earlier colonial regime attempts to capture "peasant" labor and illustrate the degree to which the endeavor was slanted toward modifying behavior to the advantages of state funding agencies. Specifically, the objective was to convert impoverished denizens of the Caribbean into productive taxpayers. In writing the introduction to Clarke's 1957 book, My Mother Who Fathered Me, M. G. Smith left no room for doubt:

_The material difficulties of West Indian economic and social development are compounded by instabilities and fluidities in the family organization on which the society depends both for the effective socialization of its young and for the adequate motivation of its adult members to participate vigorously in the social and economic life. These familial conditions affect labour productivity, absenteeism, occupational aspirations, training and performances, attitudes to saving, birth control, and farm development, and to programmes of individual and community self-help, housing and child care, education, and the like._ (1957: vi-vii)

In the end, structural functionalists fulfilled the prophecies of the funding agencies so effectively—finding that the behavior of lower-income Caribbean people was indeed "dysfunctional," "uncivilized," and "disorganized"—that they were arguably a principal force in the destruction of the paradigm. Structural-functionalism could not survive the onslaught of "structural-less" and "functional-less" findings. As for the drive to modify the morality of impoverished denizens of the Caribbean, independence squashed it. Independence for Jamaica came in 1962; for Trinidad and Tobago, internal self-rule came in 1962 and full independence in 1976; for the Bahamas, internal self-rule came in 1964 and full independence in 1973; and most of the lesser Antilles' independence came in the 1960s to 1980s. With the end of the colonial regimes, came an end to the funding of social science research targeted to turn the impoverished people of the colonies into happy, ambitious, and legally married tax payers.

##  Post Functional-Structuralist Era

Beginning earlier on, with the structural-functionalists, and extending into the early 1970s, came a short period of scientific enlightenment when scholars began to test hypotheses and apply statistical methodology to resolve the causal puzzle of Caribbean kinship and family patterns. "Survivalisms" and a reification of cultural institutions typical of the structural-functionalists still lingered in the form of typologies, an attempt to break the culture of the Caribbean into specific patterns of behavior: Wolf typed peasants (1955); Solien (1961) typed migration; Richard Price (1966) wanted to type Caribbean fisher folk; Frucht (1971) made denizens of the Caribbean a unique social type altogether; almost everyone typed marriage patterns. But the arguments were nevertheless much improved over the preceding "survivalisms" and "diffusionist" interpretations.

With the work of scholars such as R. T. Smith (1953), Mintz (1955), Cohen (1956), Wolf and Mintz (1957), Clarke (1966), Blake (1961), Wilson (1961), Solien de Gonzalez (1961), and Kunstadter (1963), the foundation was laid for a statistically and qualitatively supported understanding of connections between male migration, households, and conjugal union. The causes of Caribbean family patterns began to unravel and, had they pursued the issue, anthropologists working in the region may well have overcome the ball and chain of typology (e.g., Otterbein 1966; Marino 1970). But they did not.

Instead of explaining Caribbean family patterns, independence movements throughout the Caribbean and changes in colonial policies meant less funding. Most scholars subsequently turned away from the region. Otterbein, for example, began to focus on warfare (1970, 1994, 2004) and capital punishment (1986); Kunstadter (1967, 1983, 1993, 2002, 2004) moved on to Asia, never to write anything significant about the Caribbean again. Anthony Marino completely fell off the radar screen. Of the most celebrated Caribbeanists, Sidney Mintz (1971, 1974, 1985) went on to focus on history, and Nancy Solien de Gonzalez (1969, 1970, 1979, 1984) and R. T. Smith (1988, 1996) went on to rehash the same information and the same arguments for half a century. And so scholars working in the Caribbean and interested primarily in explanations for the sake of science largely disappeared from the scene. Others less interested in explaining would take up the issue.

## Feminists

"Feminists went to the Caribbean to correct ideological distortions by documenting and assessing women's economic, social and political roles" (Safa 1986: 1). They were funded by organizations such as USAID's Women in Development Technical Assistance Project (WIDTECH), a program deliberately targeted to empower women in the workplace and help them break with traditional gender roles, a worthy social goal in that many Caribbean economies were experiencing industrialization and almost all were being transformed by juggernaut growth in the tourist sector. But it was not conducive to academic understanding.

In analyzing and collecting data, feminists gave ample consideration to material conditions. Massiah (1983) showed that Caribbean women who head households were economically disadvantaged. Blumberg (1993) and Dehavenon (1993) both provided materialist models aimed at accounting for conditions that give way to female-headed households. Abraham (1993) showed how illegitimacy and marriage rates in Carriacou correlated with female access to wage employment. Another admirable feminist argument in regard to explaining female-headed/supported households was that women assume responsibility by default: when men were undependable providers, either because of marginal income opportunities, migration, or culturally ingrained apathy, women were forced to assume the role of household head and provider (Senior 1991: 36–37, 170–71; Massiah 1983: 10–12). A number of feminists, like Barrow (1986: 170), also documented Caribbean women as employing "strategies" to "manipulate a man thereby gaining materially and enhancing their economic autonomy" (see also Senior 1991).

But, while interesting and while they made notable contributions, feminist research was embedded in the movement to empower women. In pursuit of this endeavor it was eclectic, yielded no comprehensive explanation for family patterns, distorted the role of women in the other direction, largely ignoring studies carried out by men and women who preceded them, and often ignoring the existence of men altogether (see Greene and Biddlecom 2000 for a recent critique).

An example is the book titled Where Did All the Men Go: Female-Headed/Female-Supported Households in Cross-Cultural Perspective (1993), edited by Mencher and Okongwu, among the most notable feminist anthologies of causal investigations into Caribbean family patterns. Somewhat ironically, none of the authors investigated "where all the men went," what they were doing, if or how much money they sent back, or if female-headed households really meant "female-supported."

But worse regarding feminist contributions to causal understanding is that ignoring men gave way to one of the most obscurant myths that came to muddle a causal understanding of familial dynamics: that Caribbean women were financially and emotionally independent of men. Helen Safa (1986) a leading feminist scholar, typified the feminists in the Caribbean position when she declared in the introductory chapter for a major feminist anthology on the West Indies, "Caribbean low-income women have been fending for themselves and their families for a long time, and have learned not to depend on men for financial or even emotional support" (13–14). This poignant and often quoted misstatement was not only giving short shrift to the majority of impoverished Caribbean men—who in the endeavor to meet the demands women attached to sexuality and paternity found themselves far from home toiling in sugar cane fields, mines, and construction sites—it was not supported by research findings, not even, as seen an earlier chapter, by feminist research findings.

For many students and scholars the notion that Caribbean women were neither emotionally nor financially dependent on men became erroneously enshrined in the concept of matrifocality. R. T. Smith (1956; 1988: 8) first used the term to describe familial development sequences marked by unstable sexual unions, female-headed households, matrilocality, and strong mother-child bonds. Other scholars adopted the term and "matrifocality" became a widely used anthropological descriptive for the Caribbean family. But when Gonzalez (1970) tried to figure out what other scholars meant by "matrifocal" she found little agreement. Researchers used "matrifocal" to describe situations where women were "somehow" more important than the observer had expected: that women had influence in spending family income; as a reference to situations where women were the primary source of income; to designate female-headed households; to delineate female-dominated decision making in the domestic sphere; and at times matrifocality became confused with the consanguineal female-headed households (1970: 231–32, 236; see also Mohammed 1986: 171–72). Eventually, Gonzalez (1984: 8) herself decided that she was "no longer so sure" of her original distinction between consanguineal and matrifocal families "in either an etic or an emic sense." Even R. T. Smith (1988: 7)—who originally coined the term—came to describe "matrifocality" as "surrounded by a dense fog of misunderstanding," only to then admit to "some shifts in the meaning I now attach to it." Blackwood (2005) summed up the enduring confusion surrounding the concept when she wrote that during the 1980s the term "matrifocal" was "allowed to slink offstage without certain issues being resolved" only to return later in the form of "female-headed household." 3

In short, feminist studies of the 1980s and 1990s were embedded in a campaign to empower women—to their credit they often admitted it—but they did little to advance the understanding of the causes underlying family patterns and kinship in the Caribbean. Indeed, authors such as Blackwood (2005) have criticized early feminists themselves for having overemphasized "matrifocality," thereby perpetuating patriarchic myths.

##  Contraceptive Campaigns

Many researchers who worked in the Caribbean Basin, especially since the early 1970s, were caught up in antinatal and contraceptive campaigns. Blake (1961), Stycos and Back (1964), Murray (1972, 1976, 1977), Ebanks et al. (1973, 1974, 1975), Handwerker (1983, 1986, 1989, 1993), Jennie Smith (1998), McElroy and Albuquerque (1990), Senior (1991), and Maynard-Tucker (1996) all went to the Caribbean under the tutelage or in association with internationally sponsored fertility reduction programs. The slant inherent in their research objectives are reflected in their conclusions: high birth rates are consistently portrayed as illogical and nonadaptive, the cause of economic hardship and burdensome to women.

As seen in chapter 2, Murray's (1977) otherwise excellent analysis of the reasons that Haitian farmers give for having large numbers of children was marred by an inexplicable division of the category "useful." Murray split into two separate categories those farmers who gave "useful" as an explanation for wanting children but did not explain what they meant from those who said "useful" and then specified "as workers." By dividing the response "useful," Murray was able to present farmers as favoring children for noneconomic ends; had he done otherwise, had he accepted the implication that "useful" meant to work, the small farmers in Murray's community would have overwhelmingly come out in favor of having children for economic reasons. Similarly, Maynard-Tucker (1996: 1381) inexplicably twisted her observations that Haitian children were economically useful into them being a burden and then blamed high fertility on causes such as values left over from slavery. Handwerker (1989,1993) focused on female repression in the domestic sphere and employment in the formal sector of Antigua and Barbados, a focus that echoed his earlier highly regarded cross-country test (1986) demonstrating that female involvement in the work force was the principal determinant of fertility decline throughout the world; a valid and well supported observation but one that ignored why fertility was high in the first place or, more specifically, ignored Caribbean women's traditional careers as managers of productive households, their roles as market women, and the importance of child labor in making them successful in these endeavors. Senior (1991: 67–69) blamed high fertility on causes such as "the need to feel like a woman" and "the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply." And Jennie Smith (1998: 11), began her discussion by saying that, with regard to poor Haitian farmers, proponents of contraceptive use "are simply proposing the preposterous!" But later, in an almost humorous parenthetical and self-reflective moment, she candidly wondered why she fell into the same trap: her exact parenthetical quote was, "Looking back over the pages above, I find that I myself, however unwittingly, also seem to hold that underlying assumption" (Smith 1998: 24).4

Beyond showing the otherwise inexplicable manipulation of categories (Murray), denial of their own observations (Maynard-Tucker, Smith, Senior), and the over-focus on the formal economy (Handwerker), it is perhaps impossible to unequivocally demonstrate the link between funding agendas and the thought processes of the researchers. But it could be argued that in their conclusions researchers eschewed the obvious importance of child labor contributions because it was a conclusion that meant funding agencies and the researcher-scholar who hoped to get another consultancy job could do nothing to change the situation. If impoverished people were having many children because children were important in the struggle to survive then what needed to be changed was the entire economic system, not a practical or feasible recommendation. If, on the other hand, it was only a matter of tradition, values, lack of knowledge, unavailability of contraceptives, and ineffective healthcare systems, something could be done about it. Seminars, education, and improved clinics could solve the problem. There is also the issue of the researchers' own values. Anthropologists themselves may have eschewed presenting Caribbean parents as wanting children primarily for work because it was an egregious violation of our own middle and upper class Western values, a point that brings me to the international campaign against child labor.

## Child Labor Campaign

I mentioned in chapter 2 that the emergence of powerful pro-child institutions such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the International Labor Organization (ILO), Slavery International, and Save the Children coincides with an obsession with children. We come close to worshipping them. In Lancy's words, the transition went from preparing children to be "future farmers or factory workers—adding their critical bit to the household economy—to economically worthless but emotionally priceless cherubs"; "attitudes that have become enshrined in academic discourse as well" (2007: 278). These values were exported to the developing world through institutions such as UNICEF and Child Defense Fund. Perhaps more than in any other country, the campaign became vigorously executed and wildly exaggerated in Haiti.

The issue began to heat up with the 1984 and 1990 Conferences on Child Domesticity held in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Participants at the conferences equated child domestic service with "slavery" and, in their zeal to please funding institutions and win support, presented it as epidemic. Lumping together every Haitian child between the ages of five and seventeen and not living with their parents in the category of child domestic servant, the experts came up with estimates of from 100,000 to 250,000, translating to 10 percent to 25 percent of all Haitian children in this age category (UNICEF 1993; Dorélien 1982; 1990; Clesca 1984).

The cry of slavery came to a head in 1998 with an autobiography titled From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American, in which Jean-Robert Cadet (1998) recounted his life as a restavek, the creole word for child domestic servant. Subsequently appearing on National Public Radio and the Oprah Winfrey Show, Cadet precipitated a media hysteria. Prestigious journalists echoed the alarm with titles like "Haiti's Dark Secret" (NPR 2004) and "The Plight of Haiti's Child Slaves" (Telegraph, 2007). Frequently citing a 1996 UNICEF study, journalists upped the number of Haitian child servants to three hundred thousand, breaking the earlier records for inflated numbers and translating to about 30 percent of all Haitian children in the target age category. National Public Radio (2004) described the "slave children" as "trafficked," bringing to mind organized recruiters trucking rural children into the city to be sold. There were even descriptions of thousands of Haitian children annually "trafficked" across the border to the Dominican Republic (U.S. Department of Commerce. 2006; Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor 2007; U.S. Department of State 2006).

In an attempt to put the issue into perspective and determine just how widespread the restavek problem was, an independent organization called Fafo (2002)—funded by UNICEF, ILO, and Save the Children—sent interviewers to visit a sample of 7,812 households throughout both rural and urban areas of Haiti. Defining restavek according to the criteria of parent-child separation, high work load, and lack of or low level of schooling, they estimated the number of Haitian restavek between the ages of five and seventeen years at 173,000 (8.2 percent of the population in this age group at the time of the research); and if the age of fifteen years and under is used, the number was 134,000 (7.7 percent of the population between five and fifteen years of age). They also presented a less dramatic picture of what was going on. The authors pointed out that one problem with the image of the slave-restavek was that most of the 60 percent of the Haitian population that live in rural areas and towns have access only to primary schools that end at 6th grade or earlier and most village schools only go up to the 8th grade. Thus, families use connections in towns and cities to board their children and help them get educated so they can escape the spiraling rural overpopulation and land scarcity seen in earlier chapters (a point punctuated by Jean Rabel farmer responses seen in chapter 13). Many parents pay for their children to live with others so they can attend school. But for those who cannot afford to pay, the children do domestic work in exchange for room and board. So what earlier researchers had been doing was lumping informal boarding-school arrangements in with child slavery. Moreover, many of the child domestics were not the abused "slaves" recounted in the press. Fafo researchers found that parents tended to beat their own children more than the restavek; that the restavek had equal or greater sleeping time; and that as or more often than non-restavek children the restavek had his or her own bed, mattress, or mat. Another important finding was that contrary to the typical image of the vast majority of restavek being girls, 41 percent were boys; and contrary to the portrayal of them as missing out on education, at least 60 percent of all restavek were enrolled in school (Fafo 2002: 56–58).

But the Fafo findings did little to quell accusations of rampant child slavery or the misinformation that human rights advocates and agencies consistently latched on to. In its 2007 report, the U.S. Department of Labor ignored the Fafo data and cited instead an old and unsubstantiated UNICEF study (1997) to claim 250,000 to 300,000 restavek in Haiti, saying that 80 percent were girls under fourteen years of age, an absurd figure that places in the status of child servant one fourth of all Haitian girls in that age category. They also disregarded other Fafo findings, saying that "most" restavek worked from ten to fourteen hours per day and that "most" were not enrolled in school.

I am not saying that child abuse in Haiti is nonexistent or that the institution of restavek is not exploitative. What I am saying is that something peculiar is going on with respect to the presentation and interpretation of the data and that it is a manifestation of a deeply disturbing bias. Even Cadet—who eventually found himself testifying before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (June 2000)5— was arguably not a restavek. He tells of his wealthy white father leaving him with a childless mistress who, a twisted, hateful, and perhaps jealous woman, abused him, leaving deep emotional scars. While sad, that could have happened anywhere. It could and does happen in developed countries. Moreover, unlike the classic media image of Haitian child slaves, Cadet's father was paying for his board, made sure he got educated, and then sent him to university in the United States, where he became a teacher and, after the child slavery issue became a hot topic, wrote a best-seller, became famous, and lent his name to a charitable foundation to aid restavek. When reading the Amazon reviews for Cadet's book I came across this commentary,

As a child growing up in Haiti...I knew Mr. Cadet, I played with him, I saw him everyday for at least four years, and only thought of his adoptive mother as a strict disciplinarian. A lot of what my young eyes saw did not prepare me for what I read in this book. As they say in HAITI, nothing is what they seem.

January 20, 2000; Amazon.com By "A Customer"

Charities, such as that Cadet represented, pursued the issue with gusto, further inflating figures and creating an image of Haiti as the largest slave state since Cuban emancipation--an ironic accolade for the country that evolved out of the only successful slave revolt in history. In the scramble to solicit donations, Internet sites for organizations like Haitian Street Kids Inc. (HSKI 2007), further inflated the numbers and lumped homeless street urchins with the restavek in even more absurd and self-contradictory claims such as "There are currently over 400,000 child slaves as young as 4 years old throughout Haiti," telling the reader that they "often times are beaten to death," and that if one were to go to Haiti—which few readers ever will—they can identify the restavek by "their torn rags and tattered clothes hanging from their strained and feeble limbs, often times begging for food and money" (HSKI 2007).

The main point that I am trying to make is that the reaction to child labor and the sensationalism of the presentations reflect the extremity of the mainstream Western view of children in which having children for the purpose of exploiting their labor is criminal. The fact is that, as we already know, Haitian children living with their parents also work, something that likely occurs among impoverished farmers throughout the world and certainly occurred widely in the 17th to early 20th century United States. In David Lancy's (2007: 280) ethnology of child-adult play he noted that pushing Western values of child-adult play on other societies and impoverished peoples is "tantamount to a condemnation of the child-rearing beliefs and behaviors of three fourths of the world's parents." Indeed, by definition of the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, the Haitian parents seen in earlier chapters are in violation of Convention 138 under the Child Labor Code (Fafo 2002: 33). Thus, the interesting point is not that rural Haitians are hard on their children or that they do not love their children. The interesting point is that mainstream Western conventions regarding children are so out of synchrony with the reality of poverty that it made the childrearing practices and goals of many impoverished peoples of the world illegal.

This 'discrimination' has an impact on the social scientist. Members of the Western educated elite but with a strong tendency toward advocacy on the part of those they study, anthropologists are subject to a definitive reluctance to bring attention to cultural values that Westerners regard as disparaging if not criminal. The Western anthropologist who reveals "his people" as thinking of their offspring first and foremost not in terms of love and companionship, but in terms of labor and material necessity has, by Western standards, done a disservice to his former hosts. He has portrayed them in the annals of the ethnographic literature as criminal, calloused and selfish.

In regard to child labor, the degree to which this bias and the pro-Western values that drive it have penetrated the anthropological literature is evidenced by the five articles of the June 2007 special edition of American Anthropologist focusing on children and reviewing the 20th century anthropological literature on child studies. There is only one, just one, passing mention of ethnographies of children at work. That reference was Lancy himself (2007: 277), who tersely summed up ethnographic references to child work, saying that "the primary reason adults [in the developing communities studied] are likely to take a jaundiced view of children at play is because they would rather see them working" (Lancy cited Bock and Johnson 2004; Munroe et al. 1984; and more specifically, for the Maya, Modiano 1973: 55; for the Yoruba, Oloko 1994:211; and for the Hadza, Blurton-Jones 1993: 317).

##  Other Value Campaigns and Agendas

The reflexivity and critical scrutiny I am trying to bring out with this review is not new to most anthropologists but is nevertheless seldom incorporated in our literature reviews: the conclusions made by scholars working in the Caribbean are readily linked to our own values, political policies, humanitarian decisions, and the funding sources that send scholars to the field. Moreover, this bias is consistently present. More recent investigations bolster the point. The most cited recent article on Caribbean family structure is Evelyn Blackwood (2005), who indicted both traditional anthropologists and feminists for reinforcing male bias with its hidden presumption that the prominence of women was somehow unusual. She is correct, at least in her basic point, but her own research and her demands for specific new directions in researching alternative forms of marriage and same-sex relationships are embedded in queer anthropology. Not that I object to her motivations; only to emphasize that as with almost every major work on the Caribbean family, the study is part of a value campaign. She made her indictments as an active member of the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists (SOLGA) and with the objective of promoting the recognition of same-sex marriage, even calling for—and obtaining—an official statement from the American Anthropological Association that marriage between a man and woman was not cross-culturally universal, the implication being that same sex marriage was not an unnatural state of human matrimony and calling for boycotts of presses that published books contradicting that position (see SOLGA website, www.solga.org).

There is also Quinlan (2006: 476), another of the most prominent contemporary Caribbeanists. He recently turned the earlier feminists on their head when he described Caribbean men as "victims of their social environment," but he did so as an agent of the growing and well-funded campaign against addiction and substance abuse.

It is this type of embedded-ness that led to a decided failure to develop a cohesive explanatory model for why Caribbean family patterns were different from mainstream Western ideals. Civil rights struggles underwritten by political parties, social welfare campaigns underwritten by colonial governments, research on the role of women underwritten by feminists organizations, contraceptive and female health campaigns underwritten by international organizations bent on reducing high birth rates, gay rights activists, AIDs awareness campaigners, and substance abuse programs came to have a decisive influence on the scholarly representation and explanations for Caribbean familial patterns. Most anthropologists were distinctly enmeshed in their own biases and the biases of the institutions that funded them. Those who were not—such as Otterbein and Kunstadter—lacked the resources, audience, or incentives to continue their studies.

I want to make it clear that I am not saying that the research cited above is bad research. Each of the researchers had specific objectives, most of the objectives meritorious, and most of the research of such a high quality that it can be used to detect other patterns or to disqualify certain conclusions made by the authors. But what I am saying is that the research objectives of the authors and the institutions that funded them undermined balanced interpretations. Moreover, before concluding, I want to show how the campaigns to change behavior, those in which anthropological research was embedded, also undermined the information given by informants in the field.

##  The Impact of Value Campaigns on Informants

Another aspect of the state-sponsored campaigns described above is that they create a proactive bias among church officials and agents of international institutions that, funded by the State and foreign and domestic NGOS, define their success by the degree to which they can convince constituents, clients, and students to adopt those values, if not in deed then at least in word. By dint of their control over the distribution of grades, jobs, food aid, used clothing, agricultural extension services, and life-saving medications, these practitioners in the field promote specific values. Police officers, aid workers, administrators, seminar specialists, health care workers, preachers, schoolteachers, justices of the peace, lawyers, professors, and, not to be left out, anthropologists themselves teach—if not force—their impoverished subjects, aid recipients, clients, patients, and dependents to espouse specific Western elite values, values that the impoverished people upon whom they are being thrust often do not in practice share.

An example of the insidious impact this promotion of values has on data can be garnered from the surveys I conducted in Jean Rabel. The NHADS survey upon which many of the conclusions in this study were based was largely targeted to give feedback regarding contraceptive and health campaigns being carried out by the NGOs that funded the survey. Assistants who helped train interviewers were Western-educated doctors, nutritionists, and agronomists. Moreover, many of the interviewers had been participants in past health and agricultural programs and they had already been sensitized to the values associated with these programs. This came out clearly in their active promotion of those values, specifically the priority placed on fewer children. While training them to conduct the interviews about fertility and how many children farmers wanted, we recorded the following exchange between a twenty-four-year-old high school-educated male interviewer and a thirty-five-year-old Jean Rabel farmer who is the father of six children:

##  Interviewer: What quantity of children is best to have?

Farmer: _Okay. Quantity of children that is best? Ah, there, eh. . . . There are no children better than other children._

Interviewer:No. _What quantity. As in number. I could say three, four children, five, six children. What quantity do you see as best?_

Farmer: _The biggest child. That's the one for me._

Interviewer: _It is not the biggest or the smallest! Quantity! That means if you have a quantity of children, four children, five children. Which is best?_

Farmer: _It is best you have two, three, or six. If God gives them to you, it is best you take them._

Interviewer: _Okay. Why do you say three children?_

As exemplified in the exchange, our informants, similar to small farmers throughout Haiti, were stubbornly resistant to saying how many children they wanted—perhaps because they too knew that they were not supposed to want many. In contrast, the interviewers, high school-educated and seasoned participants in NGO seminars, tended to make the decision for them, consistently in the direction they thought proper (fewer children). Exchanges such as this, highly typical, destroyed any hope of directly measuring the number of children farmers really wanted; we could retrain the interviewer—at least we thought we could—but we could not make the farmers less elusive.

To get around the problem we introduced this question: "A husband and wife with three children versus one with six children, which is economically better off?" The problem, initially at least, did not end there. The following interview involved a twenty-six-year-old female university-educated interviewer questioning a thirty-four-year-old rural mother of five:

Interviewer: _Who is better off, a couple with three children or the couple with six_

children?

Mother: _All children are good._

Interviewer: _No. I am asking you, respond three or respond six._

Mother: _Eh, if, eh. Okay. Normally, concerning children, if God gives you three children, he doesn't give you any more, you just have to live with what God gave you._

Interviewer: _Yes. You have to live with what he gave you. But it is a question that I am asking you._

Mother: _I am following you Madanmwazel. Honestly._

Interviewer: _Yes. I understand. "Honestly." But I am asking you, concerning this question, three or six, which is better? You must decide if it is three or six._

(Silence)

Mother: _Six_.

Interviewer: _Why?_

Mother: _They are there. They will help you._

Interviewer: _Three can help you too. But six?_

Mother: _Yes, six. Six can help you more. Some will go to the garden. Some to the water. Some will do laundry._

Interviewer: (Silence)

Mother: _Okay. Three._

## Conclusion

The trend toward a plethora of nondemonstrable explanations that contradict hard data regarding causes of important issues such as high fertility, kinship, family, and courtship practices has largely undermined an understanding of what motivates people in impoverished or "under-globalized" areas of the world. In chapter 2 I showed that the trend is especially evident in the Caribbean, particularly Haiti, where scholars have provided excellent studies and abundant data showing the critical importance of children to household livelihood strategies in a harsh economic and natural environment only to then contradict their own data with conclusions that appeal to culture, tradition, and ideational values without ever explaining why these values persist or how they come about in the first place. More controversial than the fact that scholars downplay the importance of child labor is why they have done this. Why, despite overwhelming empirical evidence—evidence that many academics accepted in the 1960s and 1970s —do recent scholars reject the importance of child labor as a determinant of high birth rates? As I explained, I believe the answer is best found in the values of the anthropologists and in the value campaigns associated with the organizations that fund most anthropological studies.

What we see in this bias is the connection between social scientists, their own system, and the most powerful developed governments in the world. Anthropologists are one manifestation of Western and elite Judeo-Christian hegemony exercised through the control of states and international organizations. Be it a campaign to reduce fertility, to promote feminist values, democracy, or corporate interests, anthropologists issue forth from the academies and scatter about the world collecting data precisely in response to funds made available by the most powerful institutions in the world, institutions such as the U.S. government, the Ford Foundation, the EU, the UN, and the World Bank. Whether this is good or bad, right or wrong, is not the issue. Studies of birth rates or substance abuse or marriage patterns or homosexuality are inextricably linked to the promotion or repression of these practices. In addition to their own values, the agendas of funding agencies and competition among scholars and NGOs for funding compel anthropologists to bias their conclusions. Funding agencies' "value campaigns" also have an impact on our informants, an impact beyond the reach of newly arrived anthropologists but one that can determine the outcome and conclusions of our studies. Haitians and other impoverished informants have been taught what we want to hear: that beating children is wrong; that babies should be exclusively breastfed; that fewer children are better than many children; that children must be sent to school. This makes it difficult to reveal what impoverished people really believe and aspire to.

## *****

## Notes

1. In his 1957 study, Frazier, himself African American, accused wealthy blacks of accepting, "unconditionally, the values of the white bourgeois world" because "they do not truly identify themselves with Negroes."

2. Herskovits came to be associated with explanations for Caribbean family patterns based solely on African survivals and Frazier became identified—somewhat unfairly—with a slavery origins argument. These theoretical positions persist in the literature today. In respect to family patterns, Barrow (1986), and Sutton and Makiesky-Barrow (1970: 297) emphasize both approaches. Abraham (1993) recently argued in favor of slavery as a primary condition for the emergence of modern Caribbean family patterns.

3. The problem with matrifocality and the misuse of the concept is also exemplified in another prominent work. Safa (1986), an excellent field researcher/anthropologist and a leading feminist scholar who was seen above saying that "Caribbean women learned not to depend on men for financial or even emotional support," expanded on this misrepresentation, subsequently titling a book Myth of the Male Breadwinner (1995), thus bequeathing to a generation of anthropologists the enduring image of Caribbean women being historically independent of financial support from men. She drove the point home in her introductions with sweeping conclusions and claims regarding the English Caribbean tradition of "matrifocality" as if it were a self-perpetuating institution, something that had little to do with reality or even with her own findings. Her studies were not about the historic Caribbean, nor were they about the English or French Caribbean; they were carried out in the Spanish Caribbean, an area so socioeconomically distinct that Safa herself is one of the few researchers to have ever made a comparison. Moreover, her studies in the Spanish Caribbean demonstrated not that there was a historic tradition of "matrifocality"—as she claimed—but rather the contrary, that "matrifocality" was a response to increasing urbanization and industrialization. Indeed, given her evidence for nonhistorical causation, a better title for Safa's book would have been Myth of Matrifocality (for a similar conclusion regarding matrifocality and feminism see Branche 2002: 89). As for the "mythical male breadwinner," it was seen in chapter 17 that in the traditional Caribbean he really existed. Or at least some version of him.

4. See Catherine Maternowska (1996) for an excellent investigation of the problems of insensitive health care workers and contraceptive distribution in the Port-au-Prince slum area of Cité Soleil.

5. Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, 25th Session, Geneva.

## *******************

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