Well-Being and Community

Abstract

This chapter looks at how my ethnographic research questions the very validity of a general, abstract concept of well-being, showing the importance of taking into account local criteria and trying to overcome the often reproduced fracture between theoretical models and everyday life, between the factual and the possible. The point of departure for my critique is the analysis of how a group of Aymara intellectuals has imagined, built and represented ‘a collective indigenous theory of well-being’. Their ideology of well-being finds its origins in an idealised (and rural) past in opposition to the ill-being of the present (urban) way of life. I argue that their representation appears frozen in time and space, and offers a static definition of ‘the good life’. This echoes similar definitions and models proposed by development economics. Moreover, this chapter focuses on the issue of community values, and the tensions between these and individual desires and ambitions, which are important topics in the overall book. The discussion of models allows me to show the complexity of issues emerging when engaging with well-being and everyday life: issues of temporality and space are also fundamental to shed light on definition of well-being as well as on collective and individual identity.