Katz "Big Truck" and Farmer "Structural Violence"

In his article, Paul Farmer explores how certain structural mechanisms become embodied as individual experience. He argues that in order to understand the distribution of extreme suffering, one must analyze the ways in which the poor are the chief victims of structural violence (Farmer 383). As he shows in his two case studies of Acephie and Chouchou, in order to explain and understand structural violence, “Life experiences such as those of Acephie and Chouchou, and of other Haitians living in poverty who shared similar social conditions, must be embedded in ethnography if their representativeness is to be understood. These local understandings must be embedded, in turn, in the historical system of which Haiti is a part” (378). This challenge is one that I believe Katz calls to answer.

Katz does an excellent job of highlighting the experiences of local Haitians who experienced the quake. His journalistic style and talent for storytelling really underscores the poverty, inequalities, and violence that Haitians pre and post quake experience. Katz weaves the personal stories of the locals into broader narratives of Haitian history. Not only does he give voice to those who directly work with him, like Evens and his battle to keep his family together and safe, but he also highlights the hierarchy in who gets saved versus who doesn’t. He indicates that most of the aid went to the large capital of Port-au-Prince, which left a remarkable number of people who lived in the even poorer countryside without access to resources. This part of Katz’s text provoked a visceral reaction for me because it is a clear example of how certain bodies and lives are valued over others.

Like many of the readings we’ve had before, including Kim, Allen, Ulysse, Mohanty, Brennan, and Renda, all of the ethnographers engage in the task of reimagining and/or recreating histories. As Trouillot reminds us in Silencing of the Past, history as a social process involves people in three distinct practices: as agents, as actors, and as subjects (Trouillot 23-24). I think that one of the ways all of our texts are linked is that each author seems to always be consciously aware of all of these practices. As such, the authors are able to rework/reimagine histories and even uncover historical silences. For Katz, his story provides not only a first person account of the quake but reveals deeper complexities of poverty and violence in the broader narratives of Haitian history.