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Producing Knowledge, Protecting Forests: Rural Encounters with Gender, Ecotourism, and International Aid in the Dominican Republic, by Light Carruyo. University Park, PA: Perm State Press, 2008. 128 pp. $45.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780271033259.
Producing Knowledge, Protecting Forests explores two overarching themes running through the study of economic development around the world. Light Carruyo uses a sin- gle case study to explore the ways in which local knowledge is produced through the dialog between local realities, experiences and traditions, and global (or outside, usu- ally Western) narratives. She uses the specific concepts of development, environment, peasant, and the "serious woman" to explore the ways in which this local knowledge is constructed and how local memories of that construction reflect both local and outside influences. In discussing these themes, Carruyo makes the important point that local knowledge is neither good nor bad; specifically, local knowledge is neither environmentally sustainable and counterhegemonic, nor primitive and created by centuries of colonialism. Local knowledge does, however, reflect the agency of local residents and it is their voices that she seeks to highlight.
Carruyo draws upon 14 months of ethnographic study of the community of La Ciénaga de Manabao, in the Dominican Republic. The focal portion of the community lies at the entrance to the Parque Nacional José Armando Bermúdez, a national park that is a tourist destination for visitors from urban areas. The history of Dominican development, and the...