Forest politics, gendered subjects: Local knowledge and the negotiated meanings of development in rural Dominican Republic

This dissertation uses multiple methods to argue that economic development in the Dominican Republic has based its legitimacy on rescuing peasants from their own subsistence practices so that they may serve the nation as “productive citizens.” Likewise, discourses of environmental conservation have focused on rescue, in this case, the rescue of the forest from peasant subsistence practices. Together, and sometimes in conflicting ways, development and conservation have created categories of rural citizenship—mediated through legislation, military force, and more recently development projects—that have undermined not only local subsistence practices, but understandings of masculinity and womanhood in La Ciénaga. The core of the dissertation is a case study of La Ciénaga de Manabao (Dominican Republic), a rural community located on the edge of the Armando Bermúdez National Park in the Cordillera Central. The dissertation is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Dominican Republic between 1998 and 2001. During this time period I conducted participant-observation, oral history interviews, informational interviews, and archival research.; My theoretical and empirical focus is on local knowledge, which I argue emerges from the tensions between national discourses and peasant lived practices and definitions of well-being. Thus, this dissertation centers the ways in which Ciénaguera/os are not simply victims or beneficiaries of development, but rather active participants in creating, and at times subverting, the development landscape. In the context of a national economy with little room for small farmers, and a rural economy with little room for women, I illustrate the complexity of Ciénaguera/o engagement with development by analyzing residents' gendered relationships to eco-tourism, paid and unpaid work, and grassroots organizing. I suggest that because local voices are often unexpected and complex, it is necessary to specify the links between historically crafted identities and current development as they exist in the lived practices of local peoples. It then may become possible to imagine well-being as a process that emerges from local knowledge, rather than as a condition that results from rescue.