Casimir describes the Haitian Revolution and independence as two things at once: a secessionist war against the colonial metropole, and a deep civil fracture. The revolution figures here as an accident within the modern West's sphere of influence, one whose structures are still working themselves out inside and outside the country.

Read over the long term, Haiti's history appears as a failed attempt to reach a compromise after that unexpected split. The argument is that Haiti is now undergoing a forced return to assimilation on terms set by wealthy countries, under a new metropole, the United States.

The oligarchy of Haiti's French citizens fares badly too: its position is precarious, and it loses as the state and the nation decline more rapidly. Facing these fractures squarely, the article proposes, would let Haiti pursue its freedom from a shared internal starting point.

Scott opens with three complaints from frustrated officials: Qing surveyors defeated by the mountains of Guizhou, British soldiers unable to pursue rebels into the Burmese hill jungle, and a missionary despairing of the creek-cut valleys of Appalachia. Each speaks for a project of rule that styled itself as order and enlightenment, and each was baffled by terrain and by people who would not hold still.

From that irritation he builds an argument about the long quarrel between lowland states and the peoples above them. Living without a state, he points out, has been the ordinary human condition; the grain-growing kingdoms of Southeast Asia were late, small and thinly populated, and a land-rich frontier meant that subjects who were pressed too hard could simply go. Flight set a practical limit on rulers, and the hills filled accordingly.

Only the modern state has had the means to close that frontier, a final enclosure carried out under the name of development.

Mothering in rural Haiti is the subject here, examined through the lakou — at once a cluster of houses and the extended, multigenerational family form that occupies it, long a prominent feature of Haitian life.

Edmond, Randolph, and Richard work in the province of Léogâne, using a cultural-ecological framework and a descriptive, exploratory design to look at how mothers are sustained by family support. They note what the lakou originally rested on: members worked together and provided for one another, financially and otherwise.

Fieldwork carried out in 1972 in a rural section of the commune of Verrettes, in the Artibonite Valley, anchors Lahav's comparison of two offices available to Haitian peasants who need a quarrel settled: the chef de section, who runs a rural section on the government's behalf, and the justice of the peace, bottom rung of the national court system.

Both were built after independence and have run side by side ever since, one resting on local custom and military authority, the other on the French-derived code the young republic adopted. Lahav argues that the balance between them is tipping. Roads, wage employment, schooling and a foreign-run hospital have produced an educated and relatively prosperous stratum that treats the justice of the peace as the only legitimate forum, and the weightier cases now go there.

She reads this as social differentiation rather than government policy pulling peasants into the national legal system.

Herskovits went to Mirebalais in central Haiti in 1934 and set out to describe an entire rural community rather than one exotic practice. The result answers, by demonstration, the foreign habit of reducing Haiti to drums and sorcery.

The valley lies some thirty-five miles from Port-au-Prince, with converted trucks running to the coast a few times a week: near the capital, and by every other measure far from it. Its economy rests not on employer and hired hand but on cooperative labour, the coumbite; its social organisation follows a logic of its own, which he traces back through Moreau de Saint-Méry to the parish's colonial beginnings.

A long section goes to vodun — pantheon, services, dances — and a later chapter to its dealings with Catholicism. That encounter is the theoretical payoff: vodun gave Herskovits his clearest instance of syncretism, and the valley gave him somewhere to watch it happen. Notes on method and a Creole glossary close the book.