Simon Yampara, an Aymara scholar and activist, who started to write about Aymara knowledge systems, cosmologies and naciones in the early 1990s (Yampara ed. 1993; Torrez and Yampara 1998), shared with me his elaboration of the Aymara concept of suma qamaña at his office of indigenous affairs at the city council of El Alto in a busy January afternoon in 2009.
I started to think about this term at the mid-1980s… I attended jaqicha, processes of consecration of marriage [in Aymara communities]. Marriage is a kind of a journey; it provides one a passport to pacha, which is an interminable [cosmological] time and space. The family of the bride and the family of the groom, as well as the whole kin, give advice on how the couple can live well. They conclude the ceremony with a sort of a paradigm of life by saying suma qamaña, that is, a suggestion to live well…You can hear this same saying in almost all [Aymara rituals]. This is where I caught the idea that suma qamaña is a paradigm of life present in everyday practices… People don’t talk about development; they rather talk about suma qamaña; that is, wellbeing and harmony.
Yampara’s discussion of the origins of the concept suma qamaña associated the term with everyday ritual practices of Aymara communities in the Andean highlands. It was the guiding principle, an ideal, for harmonious life with the family, kin, and community. Therefore, it was portrayed as regulating the social organization of the community. Yet achieving full social identity (Harris 1982: 63), that is, becoming jaqi, the status of an adult or a human being acquired on marriage between men and women in Aymara social structures (Estermann 2006: 65; Medina 2006b [1999]: 269), is not a purely social affair. Through successful fulfillment of community duties and responsibilities – often based on rotational reciprocal patterns and practices – adulthood opens up a passage to pacha, the cosmological principle and organization of the universe, mentioned by Yampara in the above quotation. But the notion of suma qamaña, or good life, is not merely about social relations and cosmological principles. This became clear when Yampara continued to explain yet another aspect of the meaning of suma qamaña, while the busy halls of the city council – crowded with white-collar officials, salespersons of all sorts, and indigenous groups from the neighboring countryside – buzzed around us.
My origin is in the ayullu. Until the seventies, there was a constant conflict with an ex-hacienda, whose attempts at expansion affected the ayullu lands. One community leader told me: “We have to defend our lands, the lands of ayullu. The ayullus are not of contemporary making; for thousands of years we have been born of these lands; it is just recently that our lands have been robbed.” Ayullu was [economically and ecologically] self- sufficient. Ayullu is a jathacolca. Jatha is in Aymara a seed.32 Colca is storage, a nest, a stock
of natural resources and wealth. We talk daily with the animals, we talk with the land, that is our relationship…At that moment I understood the meaning of lands and natural resources for the paradigm of life as suma qamaña.
Yampara’s further description of the meaning of the concept brought up the fundamental importance of lands and territories for the achievement of suma qamaña. For the Aymara, “land is paramount; humans must serve the land both directly by cultivating it and through worship of the telluric spirits” (Harris 1982: 48). The state of suma qamaña (vivir
32 According to Aymara dictionaries, jatha refers to seeds, but also to a social unit of people who have joint access to lands, natural resources, and community obligations as in ayullu systems (Medina 2006b[1999]: 269).
bien) signifies harmony and balance between all the characteristics that define the ayullu: cosmologies, rituals, social and political organization, economy and production, and territory. If one of the characteristics is missing, the ayullu suffers from imbalance; that is, poverty and vivir mal (bad living). (Yampara 2001: 72.)
In Yampara’s (2008; together with Temple) writings, indigenous ayullus and nations have, indeed, been portrayed as reciprocal, holistic, harmonious, and community- oriented. This ‘Andean matrix of civilization’ (matriz civilizatoria ancestral), therefore, appeared as a contrast to the ‘Western matrix of civilization’. Crucial here is Yampara’s division of these civilizations into two knowledge systems: one based on suma qamaña, and the other on desarrollo-progreso (Yampara and Temple 2008: 176–8). Let us first consider the characteristics of the Andean matrix of civilization. According to Yampara, its cosmologies and worldviews are holistic and centered on community and nature; its economic arrangements, human interaction, and labor relations, as well as its human/ nature-relations, are based on reciprocity and complementarity: both individuals and communities as totalities strive to achieve a state of harmony and balance, and it is governed democratically through community decision-making patterns and through family units consisting of a man and a woman as a pair. (Yampara and Temple 2008: 176–8.) The Western matrix of civilization, on the contrary, separates individuals from communities and from nature; draws on private property, competition, and accumulation of capital, and creates unequal productive relations between the capitalist ruling classes and subservient working classes. It is perceived to be manifested in both liberal and left-wing political thinking; consequently, indigeneity represents an alternative political vision to both “the logics of capitalist-liberal-neoliberal ideologies” and “the logics of state interventionism and socialist ideologies” (ibid.).
Similar juxtaposing of opposites, even to the use of the same concepts, is represented in the works of Javier Medina, a self-termed Washington Consensus technocrat. Medina and Yampara both recognized their mutual influence on each others’ work but also noted that their formulations of the notion of suma qamaña had been inspired by the works of French anthropologist Dominique Temple. Drawing directly on Mauss’ (2009 [1950]) Gift and Sahlins’ (1972) Stone Age Economics, two classics of economic anthropology, Temple (1995) has reiterated reciprocity and redistribution as basic principles of indigenous economy in the Andes. When I met Medina for an interview at his home, he told me that his long-term work experience with World Bank-financed social funds (Fondo de Inversión Social), the Law of Popular Participation, and the national dialogue of the PRSPs had made him realize that technical solutions to development do not work if indigenous worldviews and traditions are not taken into account. As a result, he had developed a massive body of texts related to encounters between the ‘Western world’ and indigenous ideas (1999 [published in 2006b]; 2000; 2001; 2002), including reports written to the German GTZ on the Aymara notion of suma qamaña (2001 [published in
2006a]) and Guaraní notion of ñandereko (2002b).
Medina differentiates between two conceptions of good life (buena vida): firstly, the Western tradition that draws on mythical, Christian notions of the Garden of Eden and on philosophical, Aristotelian ideas of civilization which both, according to Medina, separate humans from nature, mind from body, and spirituality from reason; and, secondly, an Andean paradigm in which these elements are complementary. A system of classification, elaborated by Medina (2008: 63–4), between the two matrixes of civilization defines the main characteristics of yanantin (the indigenous world) as the following: community, pachamama, myths, spirituality, cyclical time-space, holistic reasoning, and gender equality among other elements. Ch’ulla (the Western world), on the contrary, relies on individuals, natural resources as commodities, rationalism, secularization, lineal time- space, abstract reasoning, and patriarchalism. For Medina (2006a: 107), the Andean good life refers to a situation in which:
[Indigenous peoples’] chacras [lands; fields] flourish; they have animals to breed, time to organize rituals, water and pasture for their animals…; enough resources for reciprocity, through which their human values appear: friendship, alliance, confidence, mutual cooperation…In this model of austerity; equilibrium; and, complacency of the good, beautiful and necessary; no human being is excluded, nor the Gods or the nature. [my translation]
Medina (2002b) defines the term ñandereko in similar ways to the historian and anthropologist Bartomeu Melià (1988; 1989), who perceived it as the Guaraní way of life (nuestro modo de ser).33 Its main components entail reciprocity and a search for fertile,
cultivable lands and territories (tierra-sin-mal). In other words, in Medina’s perception, the indigenous good life is life itself, the traditional way of life of the Andean and lowlands indigenous peoples. Medina told me that he had hoped that these insights would help to bring issues of indigeneity into the design of state policies in a more profound manner. Instead, his suggestions were not taken seriously by the World Bank staff, because, suggested Medina, “their technocrats are not familiar with the cultures of those countries in which they work”. Additionally, he had felt that at the turn of the millennium there was deep hostility among both international and national actors towards indigeneity to such an extent that “for them, it seemed crazy if someone talked about cultures, ecology, spirituality and [indigenous] knowledge”.
On the other hand, someone whose ideas on indigeneity were actually heard by development donors and national governments was Xavier Albó, a well-known Bolivian anthropologist, whom I met for the first time in 2002 in a seminar organized by the
33 The term ñandereko appeared for the first time in the Guaraní dictionary Tesoro de la Lengua Guarani, composed by Father Antonio Ruiz de Montoya in 1639 (Medina 2002b: 68).
UN. As a clear contrast to other development experts’ speeches on the Bolivian PRSP, maternal mortality rates, and population growth, Albó’s invited speech stirred the crowd of economists and other development experts with its radical suggestions of the importance of indigenous ideas for policy making. When I met Albó in early 2009, this bureaucratic incident seemed ancient history. In sharp contrast to a few years earlier, Bolivia’s governmental schemes of improvement now rested on indigenous ideas. Always widely consulted, Albó was now especially busy, having been approached by David Choquehuanca, the Minister for Foreign Affairs (more on him in Chapter Five), for the elaboration of indigenous terminologies for the new constitution. At the request of governmental authorities, Albó had also published a study about indigenous autonomies in order to further the process of constructing the Plurinational State.
As one of the Jesuit co-founders of the research and advocacy institute CIPCA, Albó had been intimately involved in indigenous and peasant movements for decades. Drawing on his long-term field experiences in Aymara communities, Albó also related the notion of suma qamaña to the traditions of reciprocity in Aymara communities which, in his opinion, involved numerous practices: community labor (ayni), exchange of gifts and services inherent in the yearly agricultural cycle, the organization of community celebrations and rituals, the organization of marriage festivities and becoming an adult (jaqi), and the elaborate rotational system of cargos (positions of authority and decision making). In linguistic terms, Albó explained that the meaning of the Aymara word suma is ‘pleasant’, and ‘good’, as well as ‘excellent’ and ‘perfect’, while qamaña refers to verb ‘to live’, ‘to reside’, and ‘to take care of each other’. Together they entail both social and ecological dimensions: that of living in harmony with the family, kin, community, and also with the physical surroundings of ayullu lands and territories. A person who fulfils his/her responsibilities and duties towards the ayullu is understood to be rich and living a good life (suma qamaña), because s/he is surrounded by a web of social, economic, and spiritual relations and has the knowledge to live with others (convivir) in mutual support. Therefore, suma qamaña connotes a condition of co-existence and interdependence between community members, nature, and the world of beliefs (see also Albo 2011).
Albó noted that there is a tendency to idealize the notion of suma qamaña. It is “an utopia attached to the past”, Albó noted, meanwhile explaining the importance that the nurturing of positive – and sometimes romanticized – visions of the past have for indigenous peoples who have continually been “pressured, colonized and disregarded (reducidos a nada)”. To an extent, classifications and juxtapositions based on dualisms between Western and indigenous worldviews are tout court remnants of the structuralist past of anthropology. Importantly, Lazar has suggested that although collective cultural values and practices do exist in Andean forms of social organization, “it would be false to propose a model of the western imposition of liberal individualism on indigenous societies that are somehow naturally (or even predominantly) collectivist” (2008: 9). She
also reminds us that while many intellectual writings of indigenous scholars in Bolivia color indigenous cultures with nuances of dynamism and complexity, indigenous ideas are often translated into popular imaginations as extremely essentialist creations (ibid.: 10). Classifications fix indigenous peoples into places and spaces that are ahistorical. There is a danger of the transformative potential of indigenous peoples as political agents becoming paralyzed through their analytical placement into stable, unchanging reservoirs of culture, rather than in real-life practices of political agency and change.