When the Hands are Many: Community Organization and Social Change in Rural Haiti

In exploring the meaning behind concepts such as democracy and social development from the peasants' perspective, Jennie M. Smith displays a firm commitment to producing a model for positive change in all spheres of Haitian life.

Smith's humanistic text is an example of the kind of honest, holistic, and humane scholarship that anthropologists are beginning to embrace in 'public interest' anthropology. When the Hands Are Many is a challenge to researchers on NGOs and civic life in Haiti. Hopefully, the donors are reading this book, changing their ways of thinking about Haitian peasants and changing the way they do business in Haiti. The gauntlet has been thrown down.... everyone interested in Haiti should pick this book up.

Interesting and enlightening reading for those interested in Caribbean ethnography; imperative reading for all those engaged in international development efforts.

Smith has called for an important debate that needs to be built on first-hand, anthropological understandings. Not only political scientists ought to learn this lesson, rather than rely inordinately on World Bank statistics and lessons of failure, but permit Haitians to craft what Haitians can create.

There is an old Haitian Creole proverb that goes: 'Men anpil, chay pa lou' (when the hands are many, the load becomes lighter). Jennie Smith, by taking this proverb as a guideline for her book, has accomplished its goal of informing us of such a state of mind embodied by the moun andeyo of Haiti. Because of that, When the Hands Are Many is an important ethnological, political and anthropological tool not only for scholars interested in Haitian society but also for Haitians themselves who have the reasons and desire to see the problems of their country solved.

When the Hands Are Many is alive with its subjects' humor and irony even as its author refuses to romanticize the hemisphere's worst poverty. Jennie Smith asks us to view the organized peasantry as she does: as teachers and guides with a message for a world in which rising tides of inequality bring misery and affluence together cheek-to-jowl. Smith's lyrical book buzzes with the sights and sounds of village Haiti, yet remains accountable both to political economy and to history.

While When the Hands Are Many will be required reading for all Haitianists, it also goes well beyond Haiti to demonstrate why and how ethnography matters. Jennie Smith's profound intellectual respect for the people she studies proves central to her research strategies.