| In the eighties, an organizational movement began to rise in Haiti. On account of “ONG Invasion” (Pierre-Étienne, 1997) as well as the alphabetization action done by the Catholic Church, numerous parts of the population were seized by a feverish urge for organization. The people's organization (Smarth, 1998) is responsible for the change. The peasants “cooperate” in agricultural organization for improving their social, economic and political conditions. The objective of this thesis is to study how the group of Fonds-Jean-Noel's peasants, located in a town named Marigot which is close to Jacmel, built their organization.;This thesis is structured around two main ideas, organization and cooperation, since, from the beginning of the study, the peasants always mention the importance to have cooperation next to organization.;Two hypotheses are then proposed: (1) the organization which is involved in economic, social and structural fields to show the concerns about improving life conditions, (2) the cooperation which is expressed according to the type of interaction (mechanic or organic solidarity). The organizational approach (Friedberg, 1997), particularly the interdependence and interactions between actors allow us to visualize the information under a “political” angle where the actor and the system contingency shape the rationale behind the way the peasants build their organization.;The method used to collect the data was qualitative. A comprehensive approach was chosen which gives a lot of importance to peasant actions. The results show the following points: the system of action that the peasant want to build is structured by a dialectic movement starting from the organization of their agricultural action toward the cooperation among themselves; the organization for the peasants is a context of action where their behaviours are chosen and calculated (strategic); the economic dimension of their organized action has priority however, over their social (community) and structural preoccupations also play a role; coffee and food production constitute the economic pillar of the action organized by the peasants; from an organizational point of view, action organized by the peasants is in a structuring dialectic; cooperation between peasants among themselves is the core of the problem that peasants' collective action have to solve; they are three rationales on which the cooperation system between peasants is based: (1) their cultural interdependencies justified by their concrete vital experiences of “lakou” and “koumbit”, (2) their contingencies and strategic interactions that are inspired by the stabilization of their organization, (3) the implementation of the mechanisms for the construction of mechanic and organic solidarity; in an organization considered in its construction process, the comprehensive methodology can be viewed as a viable setting for an analytical treatment of observed facts. |
