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.