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, 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 Explorer 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.

Aside from his career as a university professor, Kovats-Bernat has taught Anthropology at the Swain School, World History at the George School, and European History at Moravian Academy. He has also taught elementary school students at the Newcomer Academy at Lincoln, a pilot public elementary school in Allentown, PA established in 2017 to serve the special needs of children from families displaced by natural disaster in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan and Syria.

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 working-class neighborhood of Harrowgate in Northeast Philadelphia's Kensington section, in the heart of the notoriously crime-ridden "Philly Badlands" surrounding Frankford Avenue. The family layer moved to 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 the noted 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 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 2001, Kovats-Bernat received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Temple University. His 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 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 began his work with the National Geographic Society.

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.^[4]

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."^[5] 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,^[6][7][8] natural disasters,^[9][10][11] economic crises,^[12] political upheaval,^[13][14] 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:

• 2014. "After the End of Days: Childhood, Catastrophe and the Violence of Everyday Life in Haiti." In Childhood, Youth and Violence in Global Contexts: Dialogues between Academics and Practitioners on Violence in Everyday Life. Edited by Karen Wells. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan.
• 2013. "No Balm in Gilead: Childhood, Suffering and Survival in Haiti." In Children in Crisis: Ethnographic Studies in International Contexts.
• 2013. "The Bullet is Certain: Armed Children and Gunplay on the Streets of Haiti." In Adolescent Identity: Evolutionary, Developmental and Cultural Perspectives. Edited by Bonnie Lynn Hewlett. New York: Routledge.
• 2010. "Haïti Chérie." In Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research 17(3): 426-429.
• 2008. Sleeping Rough in Port-au-Prince: An Ethnography of Street Children and Violence in Haiti. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida (Softcover 2008; Hardcover, 2006).
• 2006. "Factional Terror, Paramilitarism and Civil War in Haiti: The View from Port-au-Prince (1994-2004)." Anthropologica. 48(1)
• 2002. "Negotiating Dangerous Fields: Pragmatic Strategies for Fieldwork amid Violence and Terror." In American Anthropologist 104(1): 208-222.
• 2000. "Anti-Gang, Arimaj, and the War on Street Children in Haiti." In Peace Review 12(3): 415-421.
• 1999. "Children and the Politics of Violence in Haitian Context: Statist Violence, Scarcity, and Street Child Agency in Port-au-Prince." In Critique of Anthropology 19(2): 121-138.

References