Eleven essays and an epilogue ask why Haiti is so persistently described as a place apart, and what anthropology has had to do with that description. The editors argue that the country and the discipline grew up together, each supplying the other with material and authority, so that writing about Haiti has long meant asking anthropological questions about who counts as fully human. Contributors trace the long history of foreign fieldwork there, reconsider Price-Mars and the founding of Haitian ethnology, revisit Herskovits and Métraux on race and human rights, and read Katherine Dunham's Island Possessed as a study of the researcher's own attachments. Later chapters turn to sovereignty, the humanitarian aid economy, the marketing of Haitian painting as primitive, and everyday life in Port-au-Prince. Michel-Rolph Trouillot on the savage slot and René Depestre on founding fictions provide the shared frame for a volume written by Haitian and North Atlantic scholars together.