Sumak Kawsay Research Articles

La arquitectura del silencio: lo vernáculo en las viviendas del Valle del Chota(1960-1990)

El objetivo principal de esta investigación radica en establecer las principales características de la vivienda vernácula en el Valle del Chota. Este estudio se ha desarrollado con una visión holística desde la perspectiva de la metodología cualitativa y del paradigma hermenéutico. Se trata de un estudio de caso, por lo que los métodos capitales fueron la observación científica documental y el trabajo de campo. La principal interrogante que rigió el estudio fue: ¿cuáles son los valores patrimoniales de la vivienda vernácula en el Valle del Chota a partir del influjo cultural afrodescendiente, y cómo éstos se relacionan con la vida cotidiana y la cultura material y espiritual de la región dentro de las aspiraciones actuales del Sumak Kawsay o Buen vivir? Se trata de una arquitectura que dialoga con el entorno y mantiene ese originario principio de intercambio entre hombre y medio ambiente, a través de la vivienda.

Manos del Uruguay: Exploring the Inherent Tensions between Localism and the Global Craft Economy

This paper is a discussion of the tensions between localism and globalism and their subsequent effects on the artisanal craft industry within the prevailing dynamics of the hegemonic capitalist market place. Global demand for artisanal craft has enabled a spatial relationship between producer and consumer, creating a sense of place that transcends traditional localities. Drawing from the Sumak Kawsay cosmology, this study suggests alternative, non-market-based solutions in achieving a “rooted sense of place” that encourages economic and environmental sustainability for textile cooperatives in Latin America. Through extensive participatory observation and interviews, this study presents an in-depth case study of the Uruguayan textiles cooperative Manos del Uruguay in order to understand how the lives of artisans are affected by the global commodification of local crafts. While navigating the global market and establishing a human connection between the artisans and consumers, Manos del Uruguay has succeeded in remaining adaptive and crafting a global sense of place. However, there is a fundamental need to reconnect artisans to their means of production and lessen the dependence on Western consumers and market forces to ensure ethical distribution and management of natural resources.

Amazonia and the cultural politics of extractivism: Sumak Kawsay and Block 20 of Ecuador

ABSTRACTThis article explores the dynamics of power and ideology that congeal around the narrative of Sumak Kawsay, or Good Living in Ecuador. My purpose is document these social and cultural logics of extractivist capitalism through a detailed ethnography of these processes within indigenous communities in Ecuador. Specifically, I focus on the communities within Block 20 of Amazonian Ecuador, the site of the Pungarayacu heavy petroleum project, 2008–2015, in the Province of Napo. The paper provides an analysis and ethnographic examples of the political, social and cultural relations that defined the implementation of the heavy petroleum project in the region; the analysis details not only the close connections among the State, the company, and local governments, but also the way indigenous communities were controlled and subordinated to the interests of extractivism. My argument is that, for Amazonian communities located in strategic zones, extractivism is a sphere of exchange that is intimately connected with development. Development and its ideology of Good Living naturalize and legitimate extractivist activities, and allow capitalism to expand and adapt to different State logics. The narrative of Good Living, I conclude, is ideological. Its true purpose is not social welfare or the reform of capitalism, but rather power.

Ventriloquism, racism and the politics of decoloniality in Ecuador

ABSTRACTThis article discusses two forms of discrimination against indigenous people: ventriloquism and open racism, and argues that a transition from paternalism to open intolerance has taken place in Ecuador in the context of governmental emphasis on natural resource extraction. Ventriloquism, when non-Indians speak for indigenous people, is analysed through the Sumak Kawsay (Good Living) policies of the government of Rafael Correa (2007–2017). Public racism is examined by looking at government repression against indigenous leaders and communities and Presidential speeches. The article concludes that the state’s ventriloquist and racist discourses and practices are equally rooted in the country’s colonial past. These findings are contrasted with the writings of scholars that have called the government of Mr. Correa decolonizing. The article examines the ways in which decolonial theorists informed and promoted the policies of this regime, and argues that decolonial scholars have been insufficiently self-critical and reflective of their own complicity with the state’s repressive project vis-à-vis indigenous communities.

The Andean Catch-22: ethnicity, class and resource governance in Bolivia and Ecuador

ABSTRACTThis study deals with the tensions and contradictions between resource governance, welfare policies, and the constitutionally recognized rights of nature and the indigenous peoples in Bolivia and Ecuador. We have identified a certain reductionism in current debates on these issues and propose a more systematic analytical focus on class and the class-ethnicity duality, as expressed in historical and contemporary indigenous struggles, and also confirmed via our ethnographic material. Drawing on the double bind as expressed in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 wherein the protagonists face situations in which they do not have any choice to achieve a net gain, this article centres on how national governments have to choose between the protections of rights – in this case ethnic and environmental rights – and welfare provision financed by extractive revenues. From the perspective of ecologically concerned indigenous actors, the Catch-22 is articulated in the choice or compromise between universal welfarism on the one hand, and ethno-environmental concerns on the other hand. The article draws primarily on ecosocialist arguments and on indigenous-culturalist perspectives on Good Life (Sumak Kawsay or Vivir Bien). A central finding is the existence of awareness among involved actors – oppositional movements and government authorities – that the Catch-22 quandary and joint class-ethnic concerns are unavoidable ingredients in their discourses, struggles, and understandings of Good Life.

Análisis constitucional de los derechos personalísimos y su relación con los derechos del buen vivir en la Constitución de Ecuador

Los derechos de la personalidad son considerados por la doctrina mayoritaria como genuinos derechos subjetivos de carácter civil. De esta manera, se fundamenta su consideración como derechos fundamentales, y nos planteamos su relación con la novedosa cosmovisión que entraña el buen vivir (sumak kawsay) consagrado en la Constitución ecuatoriana de 2008. Se trata de un principio constitucional que, a través de una serie de derechos y garantías de índole social, económica, ambiental y política, sin duda, orienta al Estado, el Gobierno y el pueblo ecuatorianos hacia la consecución del sumak kawsay. De ahí la pertinencia de valorar la protección constitucional de los derechos personalísimos desde el prisma de este principio rector.

The Vital Minimum Amount of Drinking Water Required in Ecuador

In 2017, the government of Ecuador established the minimum quantity of water required to be provided for free by drinking water utilities. Ecuador recognized the access to water as a fundamental human right because it guarantees the good living, known as “Sumak kawsay”, an indigenous Andean concept, in the Ecuadorian Constitution. This represents a novel approach to water rights in the world, as it is the first attempt to establish a minimum quantity of water under a constitutional guarantee by legislation, rather than regulation or judicial decision. However, this novel legislative approach raises the question of how this minimum amount of free water will impact the most vulnerable members of the Ecuadorian community. This paper provides the results of the first comprehensive research of the minimum required water provision in Ecuador. In order to measure the impact on the income of households, we built a methodology integrating: doctrinaire analyses, normative studies, and economic analyses. According to the Ecuadorian legislation, over-consumption of raw water generates additional costs that must be paid by water companies to the central government. In that regard, there is an inevitable relationship between the efficiency of the service and those additional costs. Efficiency, on this case, is the capacity of water companies (public or private) to provide water services at an adequate price, observing the following parameters: quantity, quality and sufficiency. Our research found that with this legislation in three Ecuadorian local governments (Cuenca, Gualaceo and Suscal), the most vulnerable households (i.e., low-income and/or indigenous households) will be affected the most. This means that and those families will spend the most part of their income on water services otherwise they would have to reduce their water consumption.

El Vivir bien, una crítica cultural del capitalismo

Las nuevas Constituciones políticas de Ecuador y Bolivia introducen, por primera vez en la historia de América Latina, términos provenientes de lenguas nativas: sumak kawsay, en lengua kichwa de Ecuador y suma qamaña, en lengua aymara de Bolivia. Traducidos al castellano por Buen vivir y Vivir bien, ambas nociones tienen un significado ético, axiológico y crítico de un estado de la cultura hoy en día hegemónico que conlleva un modelo percibido como insostenible ecológicamente y como insoportable socialmente. En sus diversas variantes culturalista e interculturalista, las políticas de (re)construcción del Vivir Bien, que surgen de las movilizaciones indígenas y plebeyas en Ecuador y en Bolivia desde la década 1980, exigen un “cambio civilizatorio” que en su dimensión crítica reviste la forma de una crítica cultural del capitalismo, basada en una concepción de la espiritualidad que se juega en la calidad de las relaciones interhumanas y de la relación humana con el mundo llamado natural.

El sumak kawsay desde la perspectiva del sistema jurídico ecuatoriano

La Constitución del Ecuador de 2008 incorporó la acepción Sumak Kawsay o “Buen Vivir” en su preámbulo y artículos 14, lo cual representó un cambio de paradigma que incorporó y consolidó la visión ancestral en el sistema legal ecuatoriano, para la consecución de un desarrollo sostenible. En este artículo se realizará una reflexión sobre el Sumak Kawsay, su regulación legislativa y cuál pretende ser su alcance. Asimismo, siguiendo un método de investigación jurisprudencial, se establecerá como la Corte Constitucional del Ecuador, como máximo intérprete de la Carta Magna, ha interpretado el significado del Sumak Kawsay.

Sumak Kawsay as an Element of Local Decolonization in Ecuador

The concept of sumak kawsay, buen vivir or “good life”—in Bolivia, suma qamaña, or vivir bien—has been widely diffused on an international level since the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly in 2007–2008 and the Bolivian one in 2006–2009. Good life has been understood as an alternative to capitalist modernizing development that is based on the indigenous ideal of harmony between individual, society, and nature. Nevertheless, in the usage of the indigenous movement, which initiated the diffusion of this concept, good life is a local and territorial conception of a lifestyle. While this notion of locality is largely ignored or invisibilized by the Ecuadorian government and by nonindigenous intellectuals, and to some degree even by national indigenous organizations, local indigenous organizations integrated good life into their discourse of territorial autonomy in a pluralist state. Good life allows for local decolonialization, a concrete and local fight against the structures of “the coloniality of power” framed within a discursive panorama that includes concepts of plurality and autonomy. This text analyzes sumak kawsay as a key concept of local decolonialization, emphasizing its relation to similar concepts and the differences in its usage by different actors.

El décalage de los modelos inclusivos de la población adulta mayor en políticas públicas rurales: una comparación posicionada desde la demanda en Ecuador

In this paper, we analyze the performance of the Ecuadorian model of inclusive care for the elderly population. Specifically, in an rural area of the coast, and through a concrete provincial demand. That maintains very specific rural characteristics. His older population is very demanding, which require appropriate responses in provincial Public policies. All this in a new Administrative model (Sumak kawsay). The new model of management requires Best practices and appropriate testing models, observing potentially applicable foreign systems, such as the Spanish case. These models barely meet the decolonial demands. Hence, any comparison must take a position on the demand and model. In this case, rural inclusion in Ecuador.

Entre el Sumak Kawsay y el Buen Vivir Institucional. Los discursos sociales del Buen Vivir en las zonas rurales del Sur de Ecuador

The strategies of building alternative measures of development have been established from a disconnected approach of very significant elements such as the legitimation or the dynamics of change of capitalism. In this research we study a particular case for a proposal of measuring development from the concept of Sumak Kawsay. This concept brings together very special properties which, although characterized by the same criteria as its alternatives (multidimensionality, segmentation, balance and subjectivity), resort to the novel use of a myth, that legitimizes communitary ways of living that are different to the most widespread lifestyles. This paper presents a discourse analysis of the conceptions about Good Living that can be extracted from the texts of interviews and other group dynamics carried out in the peasant communities of Nabon, a rural canton of the South of Ecuador. The analysis results a relational structure in which the limits and contents of an adaptive or hybrid discourse are defined, which is the product of the interaction between two opposing discourses: Sumak Kawsay (community and traditional) and goverment’s Institutional Good Living (societal and modern). This interaction allows to expose and to explain the set of contradictions detected; and the emergence of new categories that establish the limits of this adaptive discourse on Good Living: bad living, good dying or quality of life. In this way, the positions of the internal fractures of the populations are explained, as well as their strategies for subsistence and negotiation with government authorities.

Ecuador’s experiment in living well: Sumak kawsay, Spinoza and the inadequacy of ideas

In April 2017, Ecuador halted the continental drift to the conservative right in Latin America by electing leftist Lenín Moreno to the Presidency. Attention has turned, therefore, to the legacy of outgoing President Rafael Correa’s decade in power. To that end, this paper examines one of Correa’s signature programmes, ‘Buen Vivir’ (Living Well), a strategic plan for development underscored by the indigenous Kichwa cosmology of ‘sumak kawsay’. Sumak kawsay is a notion that has been co-opted into policy mechanisms in an attempt to both challenge neoliberal modes of governance, and to disrupt the ontological bifurcation of nature and society. Given the emphasis placed on ecological sensibility in sumak kawsay and Buen Vivir, critics have been quick to highlight the contradictory relations between Ecuador’s mode of environmental governance and its extractivist agenda. Such critiques are as staid as they are well rehearsed. Acknowledging the precarious composition of sumak kawsay, the paper questions the extent to which the ethos of experimentalism in politics can be sustained, eliding stymied technocratic forms of the political. It turns, therefore, to Baruch Spinoza’s treatise on adequate and inadequate ideas. In so doing, the paper examines how one can critique an idea without perpetuating a moral economy in judgment. Consequently, the paper considers the way in which Spinoza’s thought can be charged to recuperate imperilled political ideas.

Mainstreaming Morality

In this article, we ask how considerations about moral (and immoral) ecologies have motivated and shaped ecological resistance movements. The concept of ‘moral ecologies’ involves expectations of reciprocal, just, and sustainable relations between society and environment, which we consider a central concern of environmental movements. We analyze the cultural, material, and political importance of moral ecologies as a form of resistance by examining social movements in Alaska and Turkey, as well as ideas about sumak kawsay (‘good living’) in Ecuador and historical precursors in the form of the ‘righteous ruler’ in early medieval Ireland. Our analysis demonstrates that a focus on moral ecologies has often resonated widely, facilitated new and cross-cutting coalitions, and in some cases garnered elite support and signilcantly inmuenced national politics and landscapes.

Indigenous worldviews and Western conventions: Sumak Kawsay and cocoa production in Ecuadorian Amazonia

This article explores the role of conventions in the normalization of cocoa production in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Convention theory provides key theoretical tools for understanding coordination among agents. However, conventions must be understood as cultural constructions with a strong Eurocentric background that must be substantially modified in originally non-European contexts. A creative application of convention theory can partially overcome bifurcation among Western and non-Western rationalities. First, it shows that Western values and forms of coordination are heterogeneous, conflictive and opposing. Second, it provides key insight for understanding the transformation of subaltern subjectivities generated from non-Western rationalities that are closely associated with subjugated knowledges. Third, in applying the concept of compromise, it allows one to understand cognitive hybridization and coordination among indigenous and Western agents and thus the complexities of processes of resistance, subversion and empowerment carried by indigenous communities. This article is focused on how cocoa production in Ecuadorian Amazonia serves as an example of the confluence and coordination of indigenous (using the concept of “Good Living” or Sumak Kawsay) and Western conventions. The assertion of Sumak Kawsay is understood as a relevant transformation of Ecuadorian post-colonial relations. It is shown that relevant industrial upgrading processes are justified by, among others, Sumak Kawsay repertoires. Additionally, dialogue on knowledge and compromise among conventions, and especially concerning Sumak Kawsay and the market, have been key facets shaping the development of a differentiated quality strand that has promoted relevant changes in the subaltern positioning of indigenous farmers in the cocoa commodity chain.

Sumak kawsay in Ecuador: The role of communitarian economy and the experience of the rural communities in Sarayaku (Ecuadorian Amazonia)

This paper analyzes the concrete experience of a communitarian economy (Sarayaku) from which empirical evidence may be drawn to enhance debates around development, post-development, and sumak kawsay. Some forms of land exploitation and social organization in rural communities such as this may better illustrate the communitarian economy and can provide solid and specific clarification of certain aspects of sumak kawsay. Analysis of these realities and their theoretical implications within current debates about development are the contribution of this work. In particular, the analysis of Sarayaku allows, first, to identify a non-capitalist economic rationality; second, to show some conditions of biocentrism; and, third, to verify the difficulties of translating these experiences to different territorial environments On this basis, we conclude with the difficulties of maintaining the communitarian economy, its social organization and its form of land exploitation in rural communities in the future.

Three divergent understandings of Buen Vivir in the Ecuador of the Citizens’ Revolution

ABSTRACTIn recent years there has been an important debate regarding the revision of the notion of development in Ecuador and Bolivia, in the context of the political changes experienced in both the countries. Sumak Kawsay concept (Good Living) became the benchmark for a new way of understanding development, linked to the recovery of the role of indigenous groups and the connection of the socio-productive model with the territory and local cultures. However Sumak Kawsay had several approaches by different perspective, for example from the nearest to the ruling party in power to the indigenous intelligentsia, or also another critical with the government but no in indigenous terms. This paper presents an analysis of a series of texts that exemplify these three trends.

El Buen Vivir, entre las tácticas del consumo y las cosmogonías ancestrales

En este artículo se exponen algunas fuentes en las que abreva, en América Latina, el imaginario del Buen Vivir: la contracultura norteamericana de los años 60, la New Age y las cosmogonías andinas del sumak kawsay. Se analiza también la definición del Buen Vivir como wellness difundida por los medios, que resulta compatible con la lógica mercantil. La metodología empleada se basa en la recopilación de fuentes documentales. A partir de estos materiales, se realiza una genealogía de los discursos sociales y la interpretación de sus significaciones. El análisis apunta a la comprensión de los estilos de vida que enarbolan la bandera del Buen Vivir en el lenguaje publicitario y su sinergia con las condiciones que pesan sobre el sujeto contemporáneo.

Buen Vivir vs Development (II): The Limits of (Neo-)Extractivism

Like the entire Andean region, Ecuador has an economic structure that is dependent on primary exports. During the last boom in commodity prices the (neo-)extractivist development strategy generated economic growth and simultaneously reduced inequality. However, this bonanza was not used to advance in economic diversification or for transition towards Buen Vivir (Sumak Kawsay –Good Living) as postulated in the Constitution and the National Development Plans. We establish that (neo-)extractivism is not compatible with Buen Vivir, analysing three concrete aspects to this end: the failure to fulfill the rights of nature and ecological sustainability; the lack of advances in transforming the productive matrix; insufficient results in matters of redistributive social policies.

LA CONSTRUCCIÓN DISCURSIVA DEL SUMAK KAWSAY ECUATORIANO Y SU RELACIÓN CON LA CONSECUCIÓN DE LOS OBJETIVOS DEL BUEN VIVIR

En el presente trabajo trataremos de esbozar un análisis crítico de los distintos elementos discursivos que configuran el concepto de buen vivir o Sumak Kawsay, que tanta relevancia ha adquirido en el proyecto social y político desarrollado en los últimos años por el gobierno de la República del Ecuador, hasta el punto de quedar plasmado y consagrado en la vigente Constitución de 2008, enlazándolo con la medición y evaluación de sus logros reales de acción gubernamental y de políticas públicas mediante la construcción de un índice del buen vivir. A fin de comprobar si los objetivos estratégicos de desarrollo declarados en el Plan Nacional del Buen Vivir se han podido cumplir o llevar a término en mayor o menor medida, y cómo estos llegan a explicar los propios itinerarios discursivos del Sumak Kawsay.