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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-in-Residence, 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's Explorer-in-Residence 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. He has also served as a Continuum Instructor of 7th- and 8th-grade Anthropology at the Swain School, a pre-K through 8th grade independent school in Allentown, PA where he presently resides with his family. In the Spring of 2015, Kovats-Bernat taught Upper-School service courses in ''World Cultures'' and ''Global Interdependence'' at the George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania. 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 low-income, working-class neighborhood of Harrowgate in Northeast Philadelphia's Kensington section, (in the heart of the notoriously crime-ridden "Philly Badlands" surrounding Frankford Avenue). Chris attended St. Joan of Arc Catholic Elementary School. Later, his mother moved the family out of the city and into a modest single home in Coopersburg, then a sparsely-populated, rural farming community just south of Allentown. The family later moved out of the city and settled in the small, rural community of 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 Cambridge-educated, Massai specialist and Marxian theorist Peter Rigby,〔Obituary of Peter Rigby. ''Anthropology News'' 38(4): April 1997.〕 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, his mentor, who first raised his interest in Haiti, and who subsequently pressed him to undertake his first fieldwork there in 1994.〔Interview. ''News Radio Canada'': 1 March 2004.〕〔Interview. ''Voice of America'': 22 September 2004.〕 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 1999. In 2001, Kovats-Bernat received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Temple University; his doctoral advisory committee was chaired by Nigerian linguist and Ife specialist F. Niyi Akinnaso, and included the renowned archaeologist and historian of anthropological theory Thomas C. Patterson, Latin Americanist Phil Evanson, and theologian Katie Geneva Cannon (who would go on to assume the Annie Scales Rogers Professorship of Christian Ethics at Union Presbyterian Seminary, and would become the first African-American woman ordained in the United Presbyterian Church). Kovats-Bernat's 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 is widely regarded within scholarly and professional circles as a noted authority on Haitian cultural, social, political, and religious traditions, and is among the most respected living fieldworkers in Latin America and Caribbean, due to his of his extensive record of anthropological research amid conditions of extreme poverty, destitution, warfare, armed strife, epidemic illness and natural disaster in Brazil, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic; but most significantly in Haiti, where he has lived and worked longer than anywhere else throughout his career. Over the course of his two decades of fieldwork, Kovats-Bernat has been afflicted by several bouts of malaria, dengue fever, the chikungunya virus, amoebic dysentery, giardia, leptospirosis; he was once overcome with a swarm of hornets that invaded his living quarters, suffering numerous stings, and survived an anaphylactic reaction to the bite of a cane spider. He is also known to have been threatened, searched, suspected of subversion, and is commonly working in the midst of gunfire; Kovats-Bernat has bluntly pointed out that none of these hazards are unique to his experience and in fact are routine for thousands of anthropologists who conduct their research in what he has termed "dangerous fields." In a series of interviews he conducted with the American novelist and ''Sports Illustrated'' correspondent Jack McCallum for an article focused on his lengthy record of research and fieldwork in Haiti despite the perils and hazards he has faced in his two decades doing so, Kovats-Bernat explains that "I believe what I do matters...Why? Because in 18 years I have yet to meet another anthropologist in Haiti. Who would want to work there? I sleep in sewage. I dodge bullets. I fled the country in 2000 after being threatened by a paramilitary group. I'm terrified all the time...I'm not going to say it isn't hard...()ut my job is anthropology We immerse, observe, describe, and explain. That's what anthropologists do." Kovats-Bernat has often related to his students and colleagues a story of an encounter that occurred during his first visit to Haiti in 1994 that offers some insight into his record of continuous ethnographic work in that country. During the first week that he spent in Port-au-Prince - a particularly violent period for the country, then under a brutal military dictatorship - he befriended and breakfasted each moring with two older gentlemen to whom he was introduced as simply "Roger" and "Hal". As Kovats-Bernat tells it, it was not until his fifth day into that trip that Roger confided in him that, despite Hal's modesty and wish that his notable past not be revealed, "Hal" was in fact the famed American novelist, folklorist and anthropologist, Professor Harold Courlander. Courlander was among the first American anthropologists to develop a fully professional expertise in the study of Haitian life, and went on to author over 35 books, plays and scholarly articles. Courlander's own impressive record of fieldwork in Haiti throughout the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s formed the basis ''The Drum and the Hoe: Life and Lore of the Haitian People'' (University of California Press: 1960), widely regarded as Courlander's masterwork and seminal in the anthropological study of Vodou traditions. Kovats-Bernat reports being as embarrassed for not deducing that "Hal" was actually Courlander after five days of long conversations with the man as he was humbled by the experience of meeting and knowing him. As fate would have it, Courlander was by that time already diagnosed with a terminal illness and would pass away less a year-and-a-half later in 1996. His 1994 visit to his "beloved Haiti" was to be his last. He is said to have told Kovats-Bernat before departing Haiti for what he knew would be the last time, that it was "...not serendipity, but the will of the ''lwa'' (spirits of Vodou )" that brought the two men together at that moment in time. Kovats-Bernat has intimated to many that the fact that his first visit to Haiti was Courlander's final one, and Courlander's belief that their meeting was predetermined, has served as a powerful impetus for his continuous devotion and fondness for his work in Haiti. In a conversation he had in the summer of 2012 with Richard Morse, musician, Vodouist, and hotelier of the storied Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, Morse recalled seeing Kovats-Bernat and Courlander dining together on the veranda of his hotel, and was himself overtaken with the belief that the meeting of the two anthropologists was the work of the ''lwa'', and that Kovats-Bernat's destiny therefore lay not in the slums and garrison-ghettos of the capital where he had worked for so long, but in the Haitian interior where Courlander devoted his life's work to the first recordings of the music and oral traditions of the Vodou peasantry. Morse reportedly told Kovats-Bernat that "Hal's ghost has been waiting for you in the valleys. So have the ''lwa''." Kovats-Bernat's shift away from his longtime research with armed youth and gun violence in the slums of Port-au-Prince to his immersion in the study of Vodou belief and witchcraft in the countryside since that time is believed to be due in part to this conversation with Morse, according to anecdotal accounts of some of his students. 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 resigned that position in order to concentrate his efforts on working more intensively on his humanitarian and scholarly work, to his support of the civil arm of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), and to pursue more intensely his research into the impact of gun violence on community sustainability in the garrison-ghettos of Port-au-Prince, the cultural and social strategies of resilience among those who live in the crossfire and amid everyday crises, and on the critical role of Vodou in the daily lives if the Haitian peasantry. Kovats-Bernat married Dina Kovats in 1999; both share the hyphenated surname, as do their two children. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「J. 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