Scholars such as Mignolo, Quijano and Escobar consider social movements and indigenous organizations to be actors providing alternatives to both capitalist economic globalization and Western forms of colonial knowledge. The notion of suma qamaña has been one concept that has provided a conceptual and discursive imaginary for an alternative cultural and political framework that would have the potential to modify prevailing social, political, and economic structures. After my departure from Bolivia, I received a message from the Vice-Minister Aguirre explaining that the Ministry of Development Planning was about to organize a seminar for intellectuals and social movements working on the topic of vivir bien. Indeed, a seminar entitled Vivir bien: una alternativa transformadora de desarrollo was held in November 2009.Both foreign and Bolivian anthropologists, indigenous intellectuals, indigenous organizations, and peasant unions from Bolivia and the neighboring Andean countries gathered together to share and to discuss their perceptions on the notion of good life and its governmental application. The following is based on the analysis of workshop materials that I received from the Vice-Ministry of Planning and Coordination after my fieldwork had already ended (Vice-Ministry of Planning and Coordination 2009).
One of the indigenous organizations that participated in the seminar was the CONAMAQ. In respect of the policy content of suma qamaña, the CONAMAQ’s message to policy makers was clear: the fundamental basis for achieving suma qamaña, or allin kawsay in Quechua, is the recovery of indigenous self-governance over traditional lands and territorial units, ayullus. Through cultural representations of what Viatori (2007) calls “identifiably indigenous imaginary”, the control of lands and territories was portrayed as having much wider significance than mere economic interests or political gain. Good life, it was argued in their presentation, would be acquired through the knowledge of pacha, an Aymara and Quechua term that refers to land, earth, and universe. It has many culturally important derivatives, such as pachamama or Mother Earth, “in whom are incarnated
In our discussion, Arce talked about different strands of actors within the governing regime and identified ‘indigenous culturalists’ as those promoting cultural critique of capitalism, on the basis of Andean worldviews known as cosmovisiones andinas. He called these intellectuals and activists ‘culturalists’ because their critique did not include an in depth analysis of productive relations or capital accumulation.
both space and time” (Harris 1982: 52); pachakamaq, the creator deity of the universe and the dyadic male counterpart of the pachamama in ancient Inca mythologies (Medina 2006b [1999]: 285); and pachakuti, the new beginning, the emergence of a new cycle, and re-foundation of the universe in the cyclical cosmological order (Bouysse-Cassagne et al. 1987). The knowledge of pacha, argued the CONAMAQ representatives, creates harmonious relations between men and women, as well as between social, spiritual, and ecological spheres of life.
The prerequisite for obtaining this knowledge, and hence good life, was that it would require the people to belong to the ayullu. Historically speaking, living in ayullus was, as we have seen earlier, based on reciprocal patterns of exchange in terms of social organization and economy (Murra 1978). It also tied generations into a continuum of ancestry through land rights and inheritance of houses, while at the same time sacred cosmological beliefs and relations between the dead and the living were inscribed in specific geographical spaces and territorial arrangements (Harris 1982). In many ways the CONAMAQ’s demand for the recovery of ayullus and indigenous nations (nación originaria) paralleled what de la Cadena and Starn have observed of indigenous territorial claims worldwide: “The defense or recovery of territory has very often become more than just a matter of economic survival, but also connected to the dream of revitalization, homeland, and restored dignity” (2007: 14).
The seminar presentation clearly showed that the CONAMAQ was promoting two parallel forms of governance through the notion of suma qamaña. It argued for the construction of plurinationalism through the complementarity of, firstly, a system of indigenous nations based on ancient indigenous territories and governing structures, called aransaya (referring to the dual organization of pre-colonial ayullus); and, secondly, the Bolivian nation-state system, called urinsaya (see Klein 2003: 13–23). The antagonistic idea of ‘two Bolivias’ often used in order to emphasize sharp divisions between indigenous peoples and k’aras (whites) (Albro 2005: 434; Gray Molina 2003: 358; Reinaga 2001[1970]: 174), and with historical resemblance to the dual organization of legal and institutional systems (the república de los españoles and the república de indios) during the colonial rule (Postero 2007: 27), was translated here into the more constructive idea of the Plurinational State. While the state would, in fact, be transformed into a conglomeration of self-governing indigenous nations, there would be a complementarity between the two governing systems: indigenous nations and the state. According to the CONAMAQ, the promotion of the system of self-governing indigenous nations is justified because of the history of the Aymara and the Quechua as the first peoples in Bolivian territory, as well as on the basis of what is stated, and promised, in Bolivia’s land reform laws and international conventions on indigenous rights.
In their presentation, the CSUTCB, the main peasant organization, joined the CONAMAQ in its demand for indigenous self-determination (autodeterminación). It was
argued that the Bolivian state is built upon exploitative relations of internal colonialism which has led to poverty, unemployment, and the social and cultural exclusion of indigenous peoples. The state, it was noted, has traditionally represented the interests of a narrow political and economic elite in the service of transnational economic and development actors. As a result, the CSUTCB argued strongly for the recovery of national sovereignty in relation to natural resources and the management of the state. In the proposal of the CSUTCB, the decision-making of the new Plurinational State should take place through cabildo, the town government during the colonial period (Klein 2003: 59), but in contemporary movement discourses more commonly referred to as an assembly or meeting of social movements, indigenous organizations, and local, territorially-based social groupings. It should function on the basis of the complementarity of opposites (ayni, a traditional form of reciprocity) with representatives appointed through both rotation and elections, and with a diarchic government comprising dual leadership by a man and a woman (chacha-warmi) as inscribed in the principle of complementarity (see Chapter Five).
What these organizations and unions suggested was that there exists no alternative future in which suma qamaña – supposedly the collective and harmonious wellbeing of indigenous communities in all their social, economic, and spiritual aspects – would prevail without increasing indigenous political agency and the decolonization of the state; this would take place by emphasizing indigenous territorial sovereignties and self-governance of plural political formations. This is a radical demand for the traditionally centralized Bolivian nation-state, or any state, for that matter. Niezen, for example, has claimed that the idea of “first nation lies outside the accepted norms of nation-states and the traditions of liberal democracy” (2003: 16–7). By enhancing their own knowledge and epistemologies, Escobar (2010a) argues that they are aiming at “epistemic and cultural decolonization”. Here the question of indigenous self-governance is portrayed as a new form of democratic participation through the appreciation of pluralism. This way, the audibility of the voices of social and indigenous movements is – ideally – more strongly enhanced in the form of ‘governing pluralities’.