“What at first appears to be a book about weaving becomes something much more upon closer inspection. Making connections between llamas and weaving is easy, but organic chocolate? Those three topics, as well as six additional ones discussed by Healy, are examples of successful grassroots programs implemented in Bolivia, programs that incorporate indigenous cultural resources . . . The book is thoughtful and well written.” - Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education, Volume 17, No. 2, Winter 2005
“Llamas, Weavings and Organic Chocolate offers an intricate and intimate portrait of the struggles and evolution of a diverse set of visionary and successful NGO organizations in Bolivia over a twenty-year period. Dr. Healy, perhaps America’s most knowledgeable student of Bolivian rural development, provides the reader with a grounds-eye view of how grassroots groups can shape an alternative social vision, give it strength by tying it to Andean culture, beliefs and practices, fail occasionally, and yet battle against all odds to succeed in making that vision real. Captured for both development practitioners and students of civil society are vital lessons about how to empower the poor to shape genuinely democratic and sustainable development from the bottom up.” — Ray Offenheiser, President, OXFAM America
"One cannot understand the human condition in Latin America today without a proper appreciation of the region's grassroots organizations and NGOs, which continue to evolve in dynamic and often controversial ways. Kevin Healy has given us a vital tool in this absorbing, lucid account that challenges so many stereotypes and brings us face-to-face with complex but soluble realities. This is an engaging blend of professional expertise and manifest love for a country, Bolivia, and its people, but there are many wider lessons and applications that can be drawn from the text." — James Dunkerley, Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London
“The people of Bolivia, Andeanists in general, and the development community of practitioners, policy makers, scholars, and teachers welcome Healy’s long-awaited book. Fascinating, authoritative, wide-ranging and inspiring, it shows us that substantive development springing from local people themselves requires a commitment to particularity and a fairly long time-frame but not vast sums of money. The people themselves ‘know how’.”—Grace Goodell, Professor and Director, Program on Social Change and Development, Johns Hopkins University, S.A.I.S.
“Llamas, Weavings, and Organic Chocolate is a powerful intellectual hybrid that integrates personal narratives of the struggle for economic development and social justice among grassroots organizations in Bolivia with a nuanced, rigorous account of development history, theory and practice. Although focused on grassroots development in Bolivia, one of the poorest nations in the Western hemisphere, Kevin Healy's book has great relevance for the general analysis of development discourse, policies and methods generated within the Anglo-European world, and particularly in the United States. His testimony to the power and problems of grassroots organizing reveals an exquisite sensitivity to the ethnography of the dispossessed, as well as a clear-eyed, pragmatic vision of equitable economic development in the social context of intensifying globalization.” —Alan L. Kolata, Neukom Family Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago
“Because Kevin Healy has carefully watched, chronicled, and analyzed a set of Bolivian community organizations for almost twenty years, he brings an unusual longitudinal perspective to bear on our understanding of these groups. The resulting insights are fresh and nuanced, belying the categories and dichotomies prevalent in the more typical moment-in-time discussions in the literature of development studies.” —Judith Tendler, author of Good Government in the Tropics, Professor of Political Economy, Department of Urban Studies & Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“This is a highly informative and readable book about struggles by Bolivian indigenous communities to resist pauperization and cultural extinction in a neo-colonial setting that is reinforced by "development aid". The author tells the stories of nine "development projects" with which he was closely associated during recent decades. He attempts to convey the perceptions and words of their indigenous paricipants as well as those of "developers", placing them in their wider historical contexts. Anyone interested in social development issues can read this book with profit and pleasure.” —Solon Barraclough, consultant , and former director of the United Nations Research Institue for Social Development
“Llamas, Weavings, and Organic Chocoloate is an extraordinary acheivement based on twenty years of scholarship, fieldwork, and grassroots development work in Bolivia. Here is a candid, vivid, and inspiring “inside view” of local projects, which are redefining the meaning of development and forcing Bolivia to come to terms with its rich mulitcultural heritage. An essential book for Latin American scholars, students, NGOs, and activists committed to cultural pluralism, grassroots democracy, and biodiversity in the new global order ... this book should be required reading at the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the IMF!” —Brooke Larson, SUNY-Stony Brook
