Tacking and Tangling: Cosmologies of Mobility in the Haitian Caribbean

Jeff Kahn
May 8, 2015

Canny smugglers, daring migrants, and entrepreneurial spirits all combine to populate the mystically infused land- and seascapes of the Haitian imagination. This talk will examine Haitian cosmologies of mobility and wealth in the wider Caribbean and the alternative visions of circulating value they conjure in the face of external efforts to police and contain the perceived threat of Haitian biological and social disorder.

Currently a Weatherhead Fellow at Harvard University and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Davis, Professor Kahn has had a longstanding interest in Haiti, going back to his Dartmouth honors thesis in 2001 on Haitian religious pilgrimage and vodou.  He subsequently earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Chicago and his JD from Yale Law School.  His research centers on the anthropology of law and the state, sovereignty, migration, border policing.