“The spiral defines the perpetual movement of life and of all evolving things; it is characteristic of the dialectic.”
Franketienne
About
As a cultural and political anthropologist, I strive to understand how and why people organize politically in urban contexts characterized by poverty, insecurity, and governmental neglect.
Image: Eli Burakian/Dartmouth College
Since 2006, I have been doing ethnographic fieldwork in urban Haiti, and in 2017, I began to work with Haitian deportees in Haitian and U.S. cities. I have also written about maternal health and birth experiences, Carnival politics, protest rituals, and the military.
I am drawn to the Caribbean’s attachments to Spiralism, the school of art and thought that disrupts linear history and conventional centers of power. I feature the ti nèg (small man) to elaborate how the world works and how it might work differently. My writing grapples with the potential and problems marginalized people encounter when staking claims for power, livelihood, and respect.
I pursue this work through my position as Associate Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College.
For more, see my c.v.