J. Christopher Kovats-Bernat

J. Christopher Kovats-Bernat, Ph.D.

Kovats-Bernat in Haiti, July 2014
Born (1970-08-14)August 14, 1970
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Education B.A., Muhlenberg College (1993)
M.A., Temple University (1997)
Ph.D., Temple University (2001)
Occupation Cultural Anthropologist, Ethnographer
Spouse(s) Dina Kovats-Bernat (b. 1971)
Children Addison Kovats-Bernat (b. 2002)
Ella Kovats-Bernat (dec'd, 2004-2014)
Awards National Geographic Explorer

J. Christopher Kovats-Bernat (born 1970) is an American cultural anthropologist, and the author of Sleeping Rough in Port-au-Prince: An Ethnography of Street Children and Violence in Haiti (University Press of Florida, 2006). He is a National Geographic Society Explorer-in-Residence, a Consultant on Civil Affairs (Officer Grade P-5, Civilian) for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), and Distinguished Visiting Research Affiliate and Ethnologist-in-Residence (Distingué Invité des Adjoints de Recherche et Ethnologue en Résidence) with the Bureau of Ethnology at the State University of Haiti (Faculté d'Ethnologie, Université d'Etat d'Haïti).

In December 2014 Kovats-Bernat was awarded a Waitt Grant from the National Geographic Society's Explorer-in-Residence Program. This grant not only provides funding for his 2015 research onto Haitian Vodou, witchcraft and the sorcery rituals surrounding zombificasyon (zombification) in the Haitian interior; the award also bestows upon him the honorific title of "National Geographic Explorer" for life.

He serves as Chair of the Executive Committee of the International Society of Small Arms Scholars, and a member of the Editorial Board of Childhood, the international flagship journal of global child research published by SAGE, the fifth largest and among the most prestigious publication houses of scholarly journals worldwide.

He has also served as a Continuum Instructor of 7th- and 8th-grade Anthropology at the Swain School, a pre-K through 8th grade independent school in Allentown, PA where he presently resides with his family. In the Spring of 2015, Kovats-Bernat taught Upper-School service courses in World Cultures and Global Interdependence at the George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania.

Professor Kovats-Bernat maintains a website and a blog of his ongoing research, most recently as a National Geographic Society Explorer.

Background

J. Christopher Kovats-Bernat was born J. Christopher Bernat in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 14 August 1970. His family lived for a time in the low-income, working-class rowhome neighborhood of Harrowgate in Northeast Philadelphia's Kensington section, (in the heart of the notoriously crime-ridden "Philly Badlands" surrounding Frankford Avenue). Chris attended St. Joan of Arc Catholic Elementary School. Later, his mother moved the family out of the city and into a modest single home in Coopersburg, then a sparsely-populated, rural farming community just south of Allentown. The family later moved out of the city and settled in the small, rural community of Coopersburg, Pennsylvania, just south of Allentown, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Allentown Central Catholic High School in 1988.

In 1993 Kovats-Bernat received a B.A. in Philosophy and Anthropology from Muhlenberg College, and went on to pursue his graduate work in anthropology at Temple University. While there, he became a protégé of Cambridge-educated, Massai specialist and Marxian theorist Peter Rigby,[1] He received his M.A. in Anthropology in 1997, around the same time that Rigby succumbed to a malarial infection he contracted while conducting fieldwork in Eldoret, Kenya. Kovats-Bernat has said in interviews that it Rigby, his mentor, who first raised his interest in Haiti, and who subsequently pressed him to undertake his first fieldwork there in 1994.[2][3] Kovats-Bernat would return to Haiti frequently over the ensuing years, conducting ethnographic research with street children in the capital of Port-au-Prince, supported in part by a research grant he received from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in 1999.

In 2001, Kovats-Bernat received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Temple University; his doctoral advisory committee was chaired by Nigerian linguist and Ife specialist F. Niyi Akinnaso, and included the renowned archaeologist and historian of anthropological theory Thomas C. Patterson, Latin Americanist Phil Evanson, and theologian Katie Geneva Cannon (who would go on to assume the Annie Scales Rogers Professorship of Christian Ethics at Union Presbyterian Seminary, and would become the first African-American woman ordained in the United Presbyterian Church).

Kovats-Bernat's doctoral dissertation is entitled "The Impact of Poverty, Violence and State Repression on the Cultural Identity and Social Agency of Street Children in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.".

Kovats-Bernat is widely regarded within scholarly and professional circles as a noted authority on Haitian cultural, social, political, and religious traditions, and is among the most respected living fieldworkers in Latin America and Caribbean, due to his extensive record of anthropological research amid conditions of extreme poverty, destitution, warfare, armed strife, epidemic illness and natural disaster in Brazil, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic; but most significantly in Haiti, where he has lived and worked longer than anywhere else throughout his career. Over the course of his two decades of fieldwork, Kovats-Bernat has been afflicted by several bouts of malaria, dengue fever, the chikungunya virus, amoebic dysentery, giardia, leptospirosis; he was once overcome with a swarm of hornets that invaded his living quarters, suffering numerous stings, and survived an anaphylactic reaction to the bite of a cane spider. He is also known to have been threatened, searched, suspected of subversion, and is commonly working in the midst of gunfire; Kovats-Bernat has bluntly pointed out that none of these hazards are unique to his experience and in fact are routine for thousands of anthropologists who conduct their research in what he has termed "dangerous fields."[4]

Kovats-Bernat taught at Temple University, Widener University, University of St. Francis, and Pennsylvania State University-Abington, before assuming a position at Muhlenberg College, where he was an Associate Professor of Anthropology until 2014, when he resigned that position in order to concentrate his efforts on working more intensively on his humanitarian and scholarly work, to his support of the civil arm of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), and to pursue more intensely his research into the impact of gun violence on community sustainability in the garrison-ghettos of Port-au-Prince, the cultural and social strategies of resilience among those who live in the crossfire and amid everyday crises, and on the critical role of Vodou in the daily lives if the Haitian peasantry.

Kovats-Bernat married Dina Kovats in 1999; both share the hyphenated surname, as do their two children.

Research and fieldwork

Kovats-Bernat began conducting anthropological research with street children in Haiti in 1994, studying the effects of poverty and civil violence on their economic survival, cultural identity, and social agency. His first book, Sleeping Rough in Port-au-Prince: An Ethnography of Street Children and Violence in Haiti is based on over a decade of work with Haitian youth living amid the dire circumstances of the streets of Haiti's capital, and is a detailed, anthropological study of the intersection of childhood, poverty and violence in one of the poorest, most destitute and volatile cities in the developing world.[5]

Kovats-Bernat's fieldwork has coincided with a number of critical moments in the social history of Haiti. He first arrived in Haiti in 1994, as the country was in its third year under the rule of Raoul Cédras, a Lieutenant General in the Forces Armées d'Haïti (the Haitian Army) who led the coup d'état that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on 29 September 1991. By the time Kovats-Bernat had arrived in Port-au-Prince, "international observers [had] estimated that more than 3,000 men, women and children were murdered by or with the complicity" of the Cédras regime."[6] During this first visit, Kovats-Bernat was exposed almost daily to the violence and gunplay of Port-au-Prince that would define the backdrop of his ethnographic research for decades. Since that time, he has conducted fieldwork in the midst of US military interventions, electoral violence,[7][8][9] natural disasters,[10][11][12] economic crises,[13] political upheaval,[14][15] and historic transitions of state power. In 1995, he served as an International Observer of the Haitian presidential elections that marked the first peaceful transition from one democratically-elected president to the next in that country. Forced to flee the country in 2000 after receiving threats from a paramilitary group with ties to the National Palace, Kovats-Bernat returned to Haiti the following year to resume his fieldwork. In February 2004 he was working in Port-au-Prince during the rebel uprising that unseated then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He was in the country when Hurricane Georges struck in 1998 claiming over 400 lives, and again in 2008 when Hurricane Gustav made landfall, killing 77. In the weeks immediately following the January 2010 earthquake that killed almost 310,000 Haitians, Kovats-Bernat worked with Sow a Seed (SAS), a Haitian organization that under ordinary circumstances works to ensure nurturing conditions in Haiti's orphanages. While assisting in the relief effort, he documented the devastation wrought by the earthquake throughout Port-au-Prince and in the provinces, collecting ethnographic data on the impact of the catastrophe on the everyday lives of its survivors.

As a consequence of his years of experience conducting fieldwork amid circumstances of crisis, insecurity, violence, catastrophe, and terror, Kovats-Bernat is a strident critic of what he has identified as a specific set of assumptions still espoused and taught as axioms of the ethnographic method that undergird a number of traditionally orthodox theories, methodologies, and even certain tenets of the Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) that he has variously described as "insufficient, irrelevant, inapplicable, imprudent, or simply naive" (Kovats-Bernat 2002: 208-209).

Because of his longitudinal history of fieldwork at the frontlines of conflict and war, Kovats-Bernat is regarded as one of few researchers working at the vanguard of theoretical, philosophical and methodological innovations in the still-emergent specialization in the "anthropology of violence". He is the subject of a feature-section about his ethnographic fieldwork amid violence, instability, and terror in the 2014 edition of Serena Nanda & Richard Warms' textbook, Cultural Anthropology (Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 11th edition).

Scholarship

Kovats-Bernat has produced a sizable body of scholarship based on his twenty years of fieldwork, and routinely publishes and presents his work at national and international conferences covering the scope of anthropology, childhood studies, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, and small arms and light weapons research.

Much of his published writings that have appeared in peer-reviewed journals and scholarly texts can be downloaded in their entirety as PDF files directly from his www.kovats-bernat.com.

A representative bibliography of his scholarly production includes the following publications:

References

  1. ↑ Obituary of Peter Rigby. Anthropology News 38(4): April 1997.
  2. ↑ Interview. News Radio Canada: 1 March 2004.
  3. ↑ Interview. Voice of America: 22 September 2004.
  4. ↑ Kovats-Bernat, J. Christopher (2002). "Negotiating Dangerous Fields: Pragmatic Strategies for Vilolence amid Violence and Terror" (PDF). The American Anthropologist. 104 (1): 1–15. Retrieved 2 January 2015.
  5. ↑ Kovats-Bernat, J. Christopher (2006). Sleeping Rough in Port-au-Prince: An Ethnography of Street Children and Violence in Haiti. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
  6. ↑ Whitney, Kathleen Marie (1996). "Sin, Fraph, and the CIA: U.S. Covert Action in Haiti". Southwestern Journal of Law and Trade in the Americas. 3 (2): 322.
  7. ↑ Guggenheim, Ken (2004). "U.S. Faces Tough Choices if Haitian Violence Worsens." Ocala Star-Banner, 25 February.
  8. ↑ UN News Centre (2006). "Security Council Calls on Haitians to Refrain from Electoral Violence." 14 February. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=17492&Cr=haiti&Cr1=#.UJisSmf4WSo
  9. ↑ Sontag, Deborah (2010). "Election Violence Flares in Haiti." New York Times, 8 December.
  10. ↑ BBC World: Americas (1998). "Hurricane Georges Hits Haiti." 22 September. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/177135.stm
  11. ↑ UNICEF (2008). "Hurricane Gustav Strikes Haiti, Forcing 6,300 People from Their Homes." 29 August. http://www.unicef.org/media/media_45388.html
  12. ↑ BBC News (2010). "Many Feared Dead in Haiti Quake." 13 January. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8455759.stm
  13. ↑ World Food Programme (2009). "Haiti: Economic Crisis Impacts Children's Health." 8 May. http://www.wfp.org/stories/haiti-economic-crisis-impacts-children%E2%80%99s-health
  14. ↑ Beaubien, Jason (2010). "Political Crisis Thrust Upon Tragedy-Ridden Haiti." 29 November. http://www.npr.org/2010/11/29/131660127/political-crisis-thrust-upon-tragedy-ridden-haiti
  15. ↑ Klapper, Bradley (2011). "Clinton in Haiti /to Mediate Political Crisis." 30 July. http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/41336890/ns/world_news-haiti/#.UJixK2f4WSo
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