Development studies has not yet found a vocabulary to connect large structural processes to the ways in which people live, love, and labor. But women's and men's daily practices and the meaning they give to those practices show the ways in which they are not simply victims of development, but also active participants, creating, challenging, and negotiating the capitalist world-system on the ground. This book contributes toward building such a vocabulary through a study of "local knowledge" that exposes the relationship between culture and political economy.Many studies of the "local" treat it as a way of authorizing development projects or policies, dismiss it as colonized knowledge, or else romanticize it as "traditional" knowledge in contrast with the elite scientific knowledge provided by experts from the developed nations. These approaches perpetuate modernist dualisms, which Carruyo wishes to "unsettle" by interpreting local knowledge instead as a dynamic process, configured and reconfigured at the intersections of structural forces and lived practices.Her ethnographic case study of the Dominican rural community of La Cienaga de Manabao, which forms the core of this book, provides a unique site enabling her to explore how competing interests in agricultural production, tourism, and conservation both shape and collide with local practices and knowledge.
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
