The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala's Cloud Forest
NGOs, Ecotourists, and Endangered Avifauna: Immaterial Labor, Incommensurate Values, and Intersubjective Intentions
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Published:January 2016
2016. "NGOs, Ecotourists, and Endangered Avifauna: Immaterial Labor, Incommensurate Values, and Intersubjective Intentions", The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala's Cloud Forest, Paul Kockelman
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This chapter details the history of the NGO’s interventions in the village of Chicacnab, paying particular attention to its fostering of the ecotourism project as a means to promote conservation of the cloud forest. It foregrounds the tense relation between immaterial labor (qua commodified interactions between villagers and tourists), intersubjective intentions (qua shared goals underlying joint activities), and incommensurable values (qua disparate evaluative standards grounding practical reasoning). It shows the discrepancy and overlap between the project’s portrayal of a standardized ecotour and ecotourists’ actual experiences, demonstrating how different kinds of values (such as morality and money) and distinct forms of personhood (such as villagers and tourists) were and were not made commensurate.
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