Tacit knowledge, cultural values and agential possibility in rural Haiti

Abstract

Abstract This article recounts the efforts of a group of subsistence farmers (earning approximately $1.00 per day in income) in a mountainous rural part of Haiti who, working with a young social entrepreneur from their community, have self-organized to develop more economic opportunities by improving their farming practices communally. We posit that they have done so on the basis of the Haitian value of konbit, a form of social sharing and solidarity, and thus, on a foundation of what Michael Polanyi has termed tacit knowledge of their situational context. We suggest that efforts to secure development be rooted in initiatives aimed at catalyzing residents’ self-mobilization capacities and tacit communal knowledge and values, even if, or when, such an approach requires more time or resources to obtain desired outcomes. We also highlight critical perspectives of the now ubiquitous concept of resilience to explore the possibilities and limitations of agency that emerge from tacit knowledge in the context of continuing neoliberalism and its accompanying structural violence. We conclude that Polanyi’s ideas of freedom and agency provide a much more robust foundation on which to build a conceptualization of development and political–economic change than is offered by today’s prevailing neoliberal ‘resilience’ imaginary.