The Dominican Republic has posted impressive economic growth rates over the past 25-30 years. Despite this, the generation of new, good jobs has been remarkably weak. How have ordinary and poor Dominicans worked and lived in the shadow of the country's conspicuous growth rates? This book considers this question through an ethnographic exploration of the popular economy in the Dominican capital. Focusing on the city's precarious small businesses, including furniture manufacturers, food stalls, street-corner stores, and savings and credit cooperatives, Krohn-Hansen shows how people make a living, tackle market shifts, and characterize their relationship to the state and a pervasive, almost omnipresent corruption.
By underscoring the need to have a strong interest in labor and the labor concept - in spite of the picture of the labor market, or the lack of ""proper jobs""-and for empirical, grounded examinations of the articulations between labor and time, this book examines the condition of the urban masses in Santo Domingo, the largest Caribbean city, in the two decades from the late 1990s to 2020.Offering an original and captivating contribution to the scholarship on popular economic practices, urban changes, and today's Latin America and the Caribbean, this book will be essential for scholars and policy makers.
Christian Krohn-Hansen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo.
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