LIBRO
Prácticas del buen vivir. Experiencias en comunidades shuar, kichwa y manteña
Fecha
2020Registro en:
978-9978-14-440-4, 978-9942-09-674-6
0000-0000
Autor
Astudillo Banegas, Jose Efrain
Institución
Resumen
Good Living emerges as an alternative proposal to the Capitalist system of domination. It manifests itself as an idea for change for many peoples, organizations and social movements that for many years have resisted the economic growth model and the culture of globalization as the only way of development. Peoples and ancestral cultures of Latin America preserve their principles and practices in their daily life, which are referenced in their historic memories, as values that counteract the habits of Bad Living that are imposed by bad development.
The idea of Good Living is a Cosmovivencia, or Cosmic Livity, in construction that feeds on local cosmovivencias and Good Livings. This new mode of life requires that in the different territories and human spaces the disposition and the will for a life in equilibrium exists, that allows settling diverse levels of harmony: with oneself, the community, nature and the cosmos.
The capitalist system developed with the industrialization of the economy and the modernization of the State, promoted overall, by the former United States president Harry Truman in the middle of the last century. Ecuador, through its republican history, regardless of the ideology or political party in power, hasn’t stopped pursuing the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) Model, compromising its natural resources in the world market in unequal conditions and it hasn’t had any success on exiting the primary-export and extractivist model; not even on the last decade with the Revolución Ciudadana.
For this research three case studies have been selected, in three different ancestral cultures: Shuar from the Amazon, Manteña from the coast and Kichwa from the andes in Ecuador, with the objective of identifying the practices and life experiences that contribute to the construction of the Good Living proposal around the country, as an alternative to the dominant development model.
Participatory methodologies led us to achieve the collaboration of these communities. We were able to collect, organize and return information for its participatory analysis and validation, as a continuous process of collective construction of knowledge.
These results account for the essence of community life, impregnated with a deep spirituality, where the sense of belonging to nature is the basis of their creed, as part of a reciprocal affectionate, caring and protective relationship; where economics are about sufficiency because the importance of goods is in their use and not their price. Here the concept of biocentrism makes sense and severs from the anthropocentrism of modernity.
Research in Good Living in the local cultures of Ecuador helps to comprehend how other ways of life are possible, to overcome the inequality, exclusion, poverty and the exploitation of natural resources that the development model sustained on economic growth has forced upon us, without considering the externalities that have provoked catastrophic consequences in the life of all people and the planet.