Producing knowledge, protecting forests: rural encounters with gender, ecotourism, and international aid in the Dominican Republic

Abstract

[English] Development studies has not yet found a vocabulary to connect large structural processes to the ways in which people live, love, and labor. This book contributes to such a vocabulary through a study of "local knowledge" that exposes the relationship between culture and political economy. 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.