Producing Knowledge, Protecting Forests: Rural Encounters with Gender, Ecotourism, and International Aid in the Dominican Republic

Development studies has not yet found a vocabulary to connect large structural processes to the ways in which people live, love, and labor. Producing Knowledge, Protecting Forests contributes to such a vocabulary through a study of "local knowledge" that exposes the relationship between culture and political economy. Women's and men's daily practices, and the meaning they give those practices, show the ways in which they are not simply victims of development but active participants creating, challenging, and negotiating the capitalist world-system on the ground. Rather than viewing local knowledge as something to be uncovered or recovered in the service of development, Light Carruyo approaches it as a dynamic process configured and reconfigured at the intersections of structural forces and lived practices. In her ethnographic case study of La Ciénaga—a rural community on the edge of an important ecological preserve and national park in the Dominican Republic—Carruyo argues that Dominican economic development has rested its legitimacy on rescuing peasants from their own subsistence practices so that they may serve the nation as "productive citizens," a category that is both racialized and gendered. How have women and men in this community come to know what they know about development and well-being? And how, based on this knowledge, do they engage with development projects and work toward well-being? Carruyo illustrates how competing interests in agricultural production, tourism, and conservation shape, collide with, and are remade by local practices and logics.

Table of Contents:
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Development and the Construction of the Productive Peasant 2. Encounters: Tourism, Conservation, and Gendered Tourist Patronage in La Ciénaga 3. Disjunctures: Why “Nothing Ever Comes to La Ciénaga” 4. Collisions: Meaning, Mobility, and the Serious Woman Epilogue Appendix References Index

About the Author :
Light Carruyo is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Latin American and Latino Studies at Vassar College.

Review :
“In her account of Ciénaga and its people, Light Carruyo centers the voices, experiences, and political interests of Ciénagüeros as they confront the local state, national elites, foreign aid workers, and foreign scholars who lay claim to their community’s resources. She offers a rich portrayal of a peasant community in the Dominican Republic actively engaging the changing global economy, the contradictory development policies promoted among them by a range of actors, and competing notions of what constitutes ‘the good life.’ The result is a highly readable text that contributes significantly to multiple sociology sub-fields, including development, gender, and cultural studies.” —Ginetta E.B. Candelario, Smith College “The book is concise yet rich in ethnographic and theoretical insights. Producing Knowledge, Protecting Forests is a much needed contribution to the fields of development studies, rural sociology, tourism studies, Caribbean, Latin American, Women’s and Gender Studies. It will be classic for years to come.” —Amalia L. Cabezas International Feminist Journal of Politics