Int. J. Agricultural Resources, Governance and Ecology, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2003
Ojalá que llueva algo en el campo: unanticipated influences and development Heather McIlvaine-Newsad Western Illinois University, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs, Morgan Hall 404, 1 University Circle, Macomb, IL 61455, USA E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract: The globalisation of agriculture continues to have a profound influence on ecosystems and subsistence based livelihoods throughout Latin America. In addition to contributing to the decline of the last remaining stands of forest in the Dominican Republic, changing agricultural practices also affect traditional gender roles and household nutritional status. Drawing on the experiences, observations, and data collected by the researcher between 1991 and 1995 in a rural Dominican community, this paper explores the links between gender, food security, the environment, and community based reforestation projects. This paper suggests that participatory approaches and gender analysis are necessary, but alone do not assure the success of small-scale forestry projects given the current political ecology of the Dominican Republic. Keywords: Dominican Republic; gender; participation; agriculture; rural development; community-based forestry.
subsistence
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: McIlvaine-Newsad, H. (2003) ‘Ojalá que llueva algo en el campo: unanticipated influences and development’, Int. J. Agricultural Resources, Governance and Ecology, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp.153-166. Biographical notes: Heather McIlvaine-Newsad is an assistant professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology and a research associate with the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs at Western Illinois University in the USA. She has conducted participatory research with a gender emphasis in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Germany and the USA. Her current research focuses on the role of CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farms in the USA and Germany and the state of rural healthcare in Illinois. Recent publications include ‘Household composition timeline’ (with Amy Sullivan and Michael Dougherty in Field Methods – forthcoming) and ‘Feminism and Anti-Racism in Anthropology’ (with Paige Allison, Voices, 2000). A version of this paper was presented at the IFSA (International Farming Systems Association) Conference in Orlando, Florida, USA in November 2002.
Copyright © 2003 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
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Introduction “In the final analysis, power is the right to have your definition of reality prevail over other people’s definition of reality.” [1,2]
For the majority of rural Dominicans, their lives are ordered by the economic deprivation that they suffer. Only 11% of the current population of 8,721,594 (estimated 2002) is employed in agriculture with the remaining 34.1% and 54.8% working in industry and the services sectors respectively [3]. As recently as 100 years ago [4] the majority of Dominicans produced most of their daily necessities within the household unit. Today, those who continue to farm are unavoidably involved in the market economy and dependent on it in varying degrees for the food they consume. The majority of Dominicans continue to live in impoverished conditions, yet these conditions affect men and women differently. In this paper I will examine the different ways in which men and women, who cope with poverty and attempt to maximise their meagre resources on a daily basis, reacted to a reforestation project in the rural countryside [4].
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Deforestation, food and development
“Why do no women come to my meetings?” I complained to Doña Columbina [5] after returning from yet another sparsely attended community forestry meeting in a rural mountain village in the Dominican Republic. At the time I was a Peace Corps Volunteer, fresh out of training and ready to change the world. It was the Spring of 1991 and having survived the first few months of culture shock on this Caribbean island, I was ready to get to work. “They are busy mi niña,” she said. “It isn’t that they don’t want to plant trees, but where will they find the time?” This was the beginning of a plethora of sage observations issued by Doña Columbina from 1991-1993, when I lived in her village. A community leader, respected by both the men and women in her village and the scores of development workers who had collaborated with her over the years, she was possibly the busiest woman in El Charco. “Perhaps you should ask a few women who I know are interested in planting trees what times are good for them to meet,” she suggested. “You know women are much busier than men are.” This was my introduction to gender sensitive participatory development. In 1995 I returned to the community as a graduate student studying anthropology and international development. During this 3-month visit, I observed that the environmental and social situations had not improved much since the early 1990s. Despite that fact that the community had received additional assistance from several international development agencies, the levels of poverty and environmental degradation had worsened. The nature of the development projects had changed somewhat, with development workers consciously attempting to make community participation an integral part of their work. However, as I discovered, participation and gender analysis, while necessary, albeit complex components, are not sufficient for a project’s success.
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El Charco and the watershed
El Charco is the first village located above the larger town of San Juan de Martes in the south-western part of the Dominican Republic. It is a mountainous region interspersed with fertile valleys. Between 1991 and 1993 the community had between 1,000-1,500 people living in it. The average annual income in the 100 or so households was about US$500. The farms were generally less than 20 hectares in size and occupied land that in the USA would be considered marginal at best. The farmers of El Charco practice a complex mixture of subsistence agriculture for household consumption (beans, corn, sugar, tobacco, and some vegetables) and agricultural production for the market economy (vegetables, corn, potatoes, and beans). Over the last 50 years, the community’s one hundred or so agricultural households have seen their yields decrease due to a combination of population growth and subsequent loss of agricultural land, soil erosion, and natural disasters like Hurricane Georges, which devastated the country in 1998. The land in the municipality surrounding El Charco has been increasingly used for intensive agriculture, thus reducing the proportion of forest and pasture. Estimated erosion in this mountainous region, where elevations range from 400 to 1,000 m above sea level, is about 500 tons/hectare/year. When I arrived the community was facing a severe water crisis. Drought had plagued the region for several years. Annual precipitation averages from 900 to 2,000 mm with short periods of high intensity rainfall. The local watershed was not producing enough water for either household consumption or irrigation due to a myriad of factors. The combination of the drought, increased water usage by local households and farmers, and deforestation had resulted in water availability at household pumps only once or twice a day for perhaps an hour. Normal household activities requiring water, such as laundry and cooking, consumed much more time and energy than when water was abundant, which in turn influenced the amount of time women had to dedicate to other activities. To make matters worse, the water was often contaminated with microbes and parasites that produced intestinal diseases, plaguing the entire community. Water for irrigation purposes was even more problematic. Local farmers had devised a complex system of irrigation rights based on social and political power within the village, but it was obvious that the system was not acceptable to everyone. Those farmers farther down on the gravity fed irrigation pipeline disregarded the schedule and would flood their fields regardless of their allotted time slot. This was due in part to those farmers higher up the pipeline taking advantage of their location and also disregarding water restrictions. Tensions among community members rose to dangerous levels resulting in physical assaults and the destruction of property and crops. The entire community recognised the severity of the problem and requested assistance from several different international development agencies. I was placed in the community to help them organise a community tree nursery and to begin the reforestation of the watershed. El Charco is a 45-minute ride from San Juan de Martes via truck or motorcycle. By foot or burro, the trip takes much longer. Children who have completed all of the schooling available in the community travel down and back up the mountain on a daily basis to attend high school. The dirt road is passable and used daily by a few agricultural and passenger vehicles unless there has been enough rain to cause landslides, thus closing the road to motorised vehicles. As a result of El Charco’s proximity to San Juan de Martes, the community has been the target of many development projects. Prior to my
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stay, there had been upwards of 30 projects ranging from the introduction of solar power (El Charco had no electricity during the time I lived there, and while electric poles have been in place for several years, the community is still without electricity in 2003) to rabbit breeding. The community’s population has fluctuated over the past 30 years. The majority of educated young people, who were the targets of many of the development projects, have left the countryside to seek their fortunes in cities like Santo Domingo and La Romana. On the other hand, those who have remained behind to farm face an increasingly tenuous lifestyle. Although all of the residents of El Charco are extremely poor by US standards, there are degrees of poverty within the community. The more affluent residents live in sturdy concrete-block houses with corrugated metal roofs. These houses have two or three rooms, concrete floors, and may even have solar panels or portable generators to power a single light bulb, television, and/or radio. Those who can afford it cook with propane stoves instead of the customary wood fire. Some of these households have trucks or motorcycles, but most continue to travel and farm with draft animals – generally donkeys or oxen. The households with sturdier housing and motorised transportation also possess more and better quality farmland. The less fortunate residents of El Charco continue to live in the traditional wattle and daub houses with hard-packed dirt floors and thatched roofs. These houses are generally very small and divided into sleeping and living quarters. Kerosene lamps continue to be the light source for most households. The majority of the members of the community, regardless of level of income, dress in store-bought clothing and keep abreast of developments in New York and Miami via relatives who live in these far off places. I have yet to meet a Dominican who does not have some family member living outside of the country. Sidney Mintz [6] has written extensively about this form of economic adaptation in the Caribbean. He notes that many rural people of the Caribbean are neither peasants nor proletarians. Rather, they exhibit a peasant-like means of production along with a proletarian-like relation to production as a form of adapting and maximising their economic reality, as is the case in El Charco. The market – both local and global – is an integral part of the Dominican rural producer’s economy. Yet the decisions made by these limited resource farmers do not always make sense in the confines of neo-classical economic theory. Thus, whilst the El Charco appears to be making strides toward the modern conveniences which most of us take for granted, the emerging patterns of wealth distribution are deeply rooted in the island’s complex history, exploitation of the masses by the privileged few and an institutionalised dependency on and fear of outside institutions.
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Participation and risk avoidance
The first several meetings of the community forestry group were disappointing. Although we had secured adequate funding from a private religious institution and had acquired the equipment and seeds (mostly fast growing species like Leucaenena leucocephala (leucaena), Azadirachta indica (neem), Cassia siamea, Casurarina equisetifolia (Australian pine), and Eucalyptus camaldunlensis), attendance was worse than I had expected and people seemed to tell me what they thought I wanted to hear, rather than expressing their own opinions. Robert Chambers [2, pp.89-91] explores the concept of mutual deception in which both those in control of money and power (uppers) and those who stand to benefit from its distribution (lowers) participate in a dance intended to allow
Ojalá que llueva algo en el campo: unanticipated influences and development 157 the lowers access to project resources, even if the answers given are far from truthful. In short, villagers, like those in El Charco, often tell development workers what they think they want to hear, regardless of whether it is the truth or not. Melissa Leach and James Fairfield wrote about encountering this same phenomenon in West Africa: “Villagers, faced by questions about deforestation and environmental change, have learned to confirm what they know the questioners expect to hear. This is not only through politeness and awareness that the truth will be met with incredulity, but also through the desire to maintain good relations with authoritative outsiders who may bring as yet unknown benefits; a school, road or advantageous recognition of the village, for example.” [7]
At the time, most development practitioners believed that deforestation was mainly the result of ignorant rural people cutting down trees not out of need, but habit. The people of El Charco knew that the problem was not that simple. As in neighbouring Haiti [8], many factors contributed to the deforestation of the watershed, only one of which was fuel wood consumption. However, the villagers appeared to answer the development workers questions with the answers the professionals wanted to hear, thereby not jeopardising any future relationships which might be beneficial for them later on. In hindsight, the villagers of El Charco were skilled practitioners of mutual deception. With a vast array of experience of dealing with development workers, they knew that regardless of whether this particular project succeeded or not, another one was right around the corner. Thus, they did not want to jeopardise possible future benefits by stating their version of reality, which might clash with my own. On the other hand, I knew that the success of the project was not going to be based on what I thought the correct answers were. After all, I was only going to be there for two years and would never know as much about the community and its needs as they did. So, I tried, through various methods, to learn what people really thought about the reforestation project. Through trial and error we were able to actively involve more men and women in the project. By asking simple and in hindsight, painfully obvious questions such as, “When are you available to meet?”, “What do you want the project to do for you?” and “What kinds of trees are you interested in planting?” attendance at the monthly meetings and workdays increased three-fold. Women were generally not able to meet at the same times as men, due to different household and agricultural responsibilities. They also had different priorities in terms of what they wanted the trees to do for them. In El Charco most women maintain a patio or dooryard garden with vegetables, herbs, and fruit and coffee trees. Women were responsible for cooking for the family so it was no surprise that they were more interested in planting trees that could contribute to household food security. These included fruit trees like sour and sweet oranges, lemon, mango, and avocados. They were interested in planting additional coffee trees and also expressed an interest in propagating certain plants for medicinal ‘teas.’ Men, on the other hand, had different views on what trees should be planted. They were more interested in trees that could produce wood for fences, provide live barriers for fields and aid in curbing erosion, and hardwoods that in 20 or 30 years could be harvested for cash. By asking men and women to answer simple questions, and not assuming that I knew what the most appropriate answer was, the project was able to meet the needs of both men and women while also meeting the original goal of reforesting the watershed. The types of trees we produced in the tree nursery were more diverse than originally planned. By adapting the project to meet
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gender-specific needs in addition to addressing general community based concerns, the overall outcome was positive. Between 1992 and 1993 each of the 80-90 households participating in the project planted approximately 500 trees each. Tree types varied according to the needs and desires of the household. They were planted in various locations, again depending upon the household. In this sense, participation and attention to gender differences within the community were an integral part of the project’s success.
5
The poorest people’s realities
What was more difficult to understand was why those men and women who could most benefit from the project chose not to participate. They generally came from large households, had limited access to off-farm income, and farmed the most marginal plots in the village. When I talked to them in passing, on the street or in the local store, they assured me that they truly wanted to be involved. They convinced me that they understood the connection between trees, soil fertility, water and food security. Yet, time and time again, when we had our meetings and workdays, they were absent. What I did not fully understand at the time was how important it was to consider household composition (the number, age and gender of household members) when suggesting new activities for limited resource farmers. I later discovered that the strategies a household adopts may vary greatly depending on the amount of labour available, the reliance on cash to provide food and the access to both off-farm income and natural resources. James Scott has written extensively about the risk aversion strategies among limited resource farmers [9]. Scott states that these farmers typically prefer to avoid unproven ventures rather than take risks to maximise their average income [9, p.Vii]. He goes on to say that the decisions made by households in Russia, in the 1920s, on the margin between economic and nutritional survival are difficult to understand in the confines of traditional neoclassical economics. For economists, subsistence production is defined as a level of production that does not rise above a certain threshold [10]. Scott’s work builds on the pivotal work of A. V. Chayanov in the 1920s. According to Chayanov and his theory of household production [11] the most fundamental way to misunderstand limited resource farming systems is to view them as a normal business in a capitalistic economy. According to Chayanov and other social scientists that study limited resource farmers, subsistence production also denotes an orientation and set of priorities stemming from the household unit [10]. For Chayanov, the distinguishing factor between capitalist ventures and subsistence farms is that capitalist enterprises hire labour in order to maximise profits. In contrast, subsistence or peasant farms usually do not employ hired labour and therefore are dependent upon labour availability within the household unit. Thus, the household is the unit of production. Farm and family cannot be considered separate entities. These characteristics are similar to the ones exhibited by households in El Charco. The goal for households in this position in El Charco is an underlying need for a reliable source of subsistence for the maintenance and reproduction of the household. As in neighbouring Haiti, the Dominican peasantry does not consume all it produces, nor does it produce all it consumes [10]. In the words of Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf, peasantries aspire to a culturally standardised level of life, rather than to a continuously expanded production system [12,13]. Risking land, labour and limited capital on unproven ventures are outside of the scope of their comfort zone. Safety in traditional
Ojalá que llueva algo en el campo: unanticipated influences and development 159 farming strategies, however economically tenuous the results, are preferable to new and untested methods.
5.1 Myrna’s story The story of a Myrna, a fifty-year old grandmother, and her household serves as an example of activities outside of a household’s comfort zone. I first met Myrna via her five-year-old granddaughter, Marísol. She had befriended me and we often visited each other, sitting and rocking away the hot afternoons. Myrna lived in a large wooden house with concrete floors and a sizable patio. Although the house was past its prime, it had once been one of the most affluent in the village. Myrna was married but her husband had moved to New York many years ago to work. He returned to visit every few years and sent money to her even more infrequently. Myrna had five children, all of whom, with the exception of one unmarried son, José, lived in Santo Domingo. They helped out their mother when they could but, according to Myrna, could not be counted on to take care of her because they had families of their own. During the time I lived in El Charco Myrna’s household consisted of her unmarried adult son José and Marísol, the daughter of Myrna’s oldest daughter. Myrna had several hectares of land located within walking distance of her house. The land was marginal but was not the poorest in the community. Her son attempted to farm but was more interested in gambling and drinking than in helping his mother. The responsibility of farming fell squarely upon Myrna. She milked her cows daily, tended to the vegetables in her patio and made frequent trips to the fields, in addition to caring for her granddaughter. Because she was the only reliable adult labour source in the household, Myrna had to acquire additional labour from outside the household or let her fields lie fallow. Her son could not be counted on to work regularly; thus, she made a deal with one of the more affluent families in the village to rent out some of her land in return for a portion of the crops (beans and corn) and monthly cash payments. Myrna insisted that her granddaughter should not work in the fields, like many young children in the village, but go to school instead. I had repeatedly asked Myrna if she was interested in participating in the forestry project and while she seemed interested she was also hesitant. We would talk about how she could acquire more trees for her patio if she contributed a few hours a month to helping tend to the tree nursery. She seemed truly interested but had no extra time of her own and her son refused to participate. At one point she did send her granddaughter to help water the seedlings, but Marísol was in school in the mornings and her afternoons were often filled with household responsibilities like washing clothes and helping her grandmother clean and sew for local clients. When I returned to the community in 1995, for a visit, I asked Myrna about the trees she had received from the project. She showed me the spot where five of the trees had been planted. Only two remained. She seemed ambivalent about the trees. She explained that while Marísol had lived with her the trees were watered on a daily basis. Not long after I left the community Marísol’s mother had returned from the capital and had taken her daughter back to live with her. This left the responsibility of watering the trees to Myrna. In addition to her other responsibilities, she was unable to take care of all the trees. Those trees closer to the backyard faucet survived, the others did not. At the time of my last visit the trees were producing fruit, most of which was rotting on the ground.
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Myrna used what she could for her own consumption, but was unable to sell or trade the remaining fruit. The local market in El Charco was inundated with fruit and transportation to larger markets was unreliable and expensive. While she enjoyed the trees for their shade and fruit, she seemed unconvinced that the effort had been worth it.
5.2 A Chayanovian analysis of Myrna’s story In this example, it is clear that one of the contributing factors to Myrna’s participation in the project was the availability of labour within the household. Myrna was responsible for virtually all of the agricultural and household tasks. Although she had a large family labour availability in the household was limited during the time I knew her. One of the solutions to the labour shortage was to hire labour to help with the fields. However, there was not enough cash available to hire sufficient labour for all the work. Another solution employed by the household was to rent out the land they were unable to farm. This provided the household with an additional source of cash income, access to beans and corn, and a guarantee that the land would not lie fallow. The stage of the household labour lifecycle in which the forestry project presented itself was not conducive to her participation. Had the project arrived ten years earlier when the household had an abundance of adult labour, perhaps the project would have been better received. However, from 1991-1993 the household members were either not physically present or unable to allocate time for another activity. A second point to consider in this example is the importance of the activity (in this case reforestation of the watershed) to the household. Chayanov, Mintz, Wolfe and others argue [14,12,13] that work is performed first and foremost to meet the needs of the household. The needs of the household may not include profit maximisation or environmental conservation but almost always includes the reproduction of the household unit. Thus, peasant-farming systems are generally risk-averse and tend to employ a wide variety of production activities in order to maintain a level of security for the household unit. Whilst Myrna’s household was not the richest in the community neither was it the poorest. Myrna was able to meet her subsistence needs and thereby achieved a level of security for herself and her household. She supplemented her income by sewing for others in the community and had access to cash and food by renting out the land she could not farm herself. She also kept two dairy cattle which provided milk for her and other family members. She was also almost always able to sell the extra milk or trade it at the local store for other items she needed. In addition, Myrna kept a few chickens on her patio for eggs, fertiliser for her vegetables, and occasionally for meat when her children would visit. Thus, Myrna and her household were meeting the needs of the household through a combination of diverse activities. The third important component of Chayanov’s theory maintains that while household reproduction is often met through the employment of diverse strategies, a monetary value is not always attached to these approaches. Although the majority of the concepts employed by Myrna have material value or qualities attached to them, she was not making a great deal of money although she was able to provide for her household. While she planted a few trees and they produced some fruit, she was unable to profit monetarily from them due to limited access to markets and an overabundance of fruit all coming to the market at the same time. She was also a talented seamstress, yet the physical location of her shop and the lack of reliable transportation restricted the type and frequency of work she could undertake for cash. Thus, labour within the peasant farming system is not
Ojalá que llueva algo en el campo: unanticipated influences and development 161 usually measured in cash wages but is valued in concepts like food security and leisure time. Myrna was able to provide for her household and also have valued free time to spend with her granddaughter and friends.
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Gendered livelihood epistemology: a framework for understanding
The hesitancy to become involved in unproven development projects is frustrating, but understandable when examined through the lens of what I call a gendered livelihood epistemology. In the following section I will briefly outline the factors contributing to the formulation of a gendered livelihood epistemology and explain why it is important for development practioners to consider these factors before and during project implementation.
6.1 Gendered political ecology Gendered political ecology [15] acknowledges the importance of external political and economic forces on rural communities, while at the same time giving attention to the interactions among class, ethnic and gender hierarchies that affect the use of resources at both the macro and micro levels. This approach maintains that local populations are neither the saviours of the environment nor entirely responsible for its degradation. Rather, gendered political ecology attempts to examine the many factors that affect local behaviour regarding the environment, while focussing on the balance between the short-term necessity to produce a sufficient amount of food with the importance for the long-term sustainable conservation of natural resources [16]. This type of thinking is important for understanding the complexities of communities and households like those found in El Charco. One of the pillars of gendered political ecology is the importance of identifying the social heterogeneity found among seemingly homogeneous rural populations. Gender analysis provides an additional window through which to identify and analyse the heterogeneity found within the community and household. Gender is understood as the social construction that shapes the interactions between men and women [17,18]. Gender as a social construct is transmitted through the process of socialisation. Therefore, gender cannot be understood as a biologically based construct but, rather, a socio-cultural paradigm that varies among social groups. The specific social construction of gender shapes the roles, identities, experiences, knowledge and power relations between men and women. These social constructions take place on various levels, beginning at the family and household level and extending to the community level and the larger political, economic and cultural tiers. The social construction of gender will vary according to other variables like age, class, religion and ethnicity. Gender is also shaped, and may be recreated, several times over the course of a lifetime on the individual level depending on such variables as access to education, income and personal characteristics and choices [16]. Gender and Development as a conceptual approach grew out of the Women in Development (WID) critiques of development. These first female-centred critiques of development directed their attention to the neglect of women when considering the household as a unit of analysis, such that only women’s reproductive roles were
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recognised [19,20]. The WID framework, in an attempt to bring attention to the plight of women, concentrated on the negative effects of these programs targeting women [21]. The WID approach was the first attempt to correct the negative effects on women by calling for gender equality in a development process that otherwise would continue to worsen women’s positions [22]. Following the WID approach, the Gender and Development (GAD) methodology analysed women’s contributions to the economy by emphasising the positive contributions of empowered women. GAD viewed women as agents of change, not as victims of development. In addition, this methodology brought to light the importance of the power relations between women and men [22]. These approaches did not necessarily question the basic assumptions of development, as did others [23].
6.2 Feminist standpoint epistemology Whilst different cultures may possess commonly discernable general socio-economic beliefs and hierarchies, each individual will experience his or her place in society from a distinctive standpoint. This explains, in part, why some individuals in El Charco participated in the project whilst others did not. Incorporating and modifying these important points of feminist standpoint epistemology into development project planning and implementation is important for this reason. Feminist standpoint epistemology [24–28] argues that women and men have distinctive locations in nature and specific access to resources and culture that result in gender-specific knowledge. The failure to acknowledge and incorporate the gender-specific knowledge produced by women can result in conservation and development planning that excludes crucial understandings of natural resource management. This, in turn, may result in projects that ‘misbehave’ or do not function as planned [29,30]. As previously noted, men and women in El Charco voiced different concerns, goals and needs pertaining to the reforestation project. A strictly feminist standpoint epistemology asserts “there are important resources for the production of knowledge to be found in starting off research projects from issues arising in women’s lives rather than only from the dominant androcentric conceptual frameworks of the disciplines and the larger social order” [28, p.149]. By beginning from a femalecentred perspective, feminist standpoint epistemology is committed to a feminist stance and for that reason is more likely to include epistemological and philosophical critiques that challenge the basic structure and assumptions of modern day development. By asking women the questions “What do you want from the project?”, “What kinds of trees do you want?” and “How much time can you dedicate to the maintenance of the trees?” projects that might have ignored the needs of women, as did this reforestation project in the beginning, are able to realign their plans to meet the needs of the clients. Feminist standpoint epistemology also maintains that women’s knowledge is diverse. Not all women know the same things. Some women were more interested in planting medicinal plants than others because, within the community, there were designated individuals who possessed this knowledge. I would also argue from the gender standpoint that not all men possess the same knowledge. There are two types of differences that provide validity of feminist standpoint epistemology whilst also explaining the heterogeneity found among women (and men). This first difference is politically assigned and is located in the social class, race and national standings of women. The second difference is culturally located and refers to differences in ethnicity, sexuality and religion [28, p.149]. Thus, according to Harding,
Ojalá que llueva algo en el campo: unanticipated influences and development 163 “standpoint epistemology sets the relationship between knowledge and politics at the centre of its account in the sense that it tries to explain the effects that different kinds of political arrangements have on the production of knowledge.” [28, p.153]
Cultural differences are not excluded, but they assume a secondary role in an androcentric dominated political system. The main difference between feminist standpoint epistemology and gendered political ecology is the focal point of women and the exclusion of men in feminist standpoint epistemology. Gendered political ecology holds that gender and the roles performed by women and men are crucial to understanding the livelihood systems of rural communities. Feminist standpoint epistemology, with its focus on women, ignores the importance of the articulation between the gender roles assumed by both women and men. Feminist standpoint epistemology is useful for analysing participation and potential barriers for project success in El Charco because women were responsible for the production of staple food products for their households and are therefore directly linked to household food security. It is, however, also essential to analyse the diverse roles that men play in El Charco and communities like it. Therefore, I have modified feminist standpoint epistemology to include men. Men assume gender roles that are traditionally assigned to women in some households in which there are no women present and vice versa. Therefore, it is important to focus on women’s and men’s contributions to food production.
6.3 Gendered standpoint epistemology The synthesis of gendered political ecology and feminist standpoint epistemology into what I call gendered livelihood epistemology, provides a flexible framework for exploring a more complete set of environmental, economic, political, social, and gender issues that affect the use and allocation of natural resources. Gender may not always be the most relevant social category for analysis. However, it appears that in the community of El Charco gender resulted in different relations to the natural resource base and different needs and desires from the project. These unique standpoints in combination with the social, political, ethnic, and economic aspects of life in rural communities offer an innovative way of analysing the current production and conservation systems. Thus gendered standpoint epistemology recognises the importance of women’s roles in food production but does not marginalise the roles of men in maintaining the household. It also pays particular attention to the articulation between the gender roles and thus incorporates the broader social, political, ethnic and economic influences that affect both men and women.
7
Pues sí, mañana
On my last visit to El Charco, in 1995, the community was relatively unchanged from the early 1990s. Electricity and potable water were no more reliable than when I had lived there and the pace of life continued to be unhurried and relaxed. The portion of the watershed that had been reforested continued to prosper, although the tree nursery was no longer producing new trees and no one seemed interested in renewing the project. “Ojalá
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que llueva café en el campo”, [31] a popular merengue song by the Dominican group Juan Luis Guerra and 440, blared from a portable radio while men and stray dogs huddled in the shade of a large tree playing dominos. The women and children of El Charco gathered by the new communal water pump to wash clothes and socialise. As the title of the song implies, the people of El Charco appeared to be waiting for the rain to bring them a more prosperous life, whether it be in the form of coffee or something else yet unnamed. Although to an outsider, the people of El Charco may appear to hinder their chances at achieving more prosperous livelihoods, they are survivors and careful planners of unprecedented cultural and environmental change. Their reluctance to enter into new and unproven development projects is a way in which they can, to some degree, control their destinies. As one of the men playing dominos noted: “Carnival is right around the corner. It is one of the few times of the year when my family and I can laugh and dance, eat our fill, and drink the nights away without worry. Maybe I should be spending my money and time on other things, but there’s always tomorrow, right!”
Although I am not certain that the development and lifestyle the people of El Charco hope for will ever come to fruition, I now at least have some understanding of the challenges that lie ahead of them as they work towards improving their environment, livelihoods and health.
Acknowledgement The author would like to thank the people of El Charco for their time, patience, and wisdom. She is also most grateful to Dr. Drexel Woodson from the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona for his insightful comments and suggestions to this paper. Finally, she is indebted to Dr. Peter Hildebrand and Dr. Marianne Schmink of the University of Florida, and the reviewers and editors of IJARGE for their valuable suggestions.
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30 Buvinic, M. (1986) ‘Projects for women in the Third World: explaining their misbehavior’, World Development, Vol. 14, No. 5, pp.653-664. 31 The literal translation for Ojalá que llueva café en el campo is ‘I hope that it rains coffee in the countryside.’ A more philosophical translation refers to the longing for prosperity and change to the rural Dominican life.
