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Introduction
Vivir Bien as a postneoliberal alternative in the global world
As my fieldwork began I was touched by a story that, I later realized, aptly crystallized some of the key elements of the Bolivian state transformation process: deeply rooted ethnic and economic inequalities, hierarchical power relations, hopes for indigenous liberation, and a dream of a new beginning. It was a story about a domestic worker who, for the first time, confronted her employer through a very simple but significant expression: when the employer addressed her, she raised her head and looked her employer straight in the eyes. It was such a simple gesture that for most outside observers it would have gone unnoticed, yet it meant a world of difference both for the domestic servant and the employer. For the domestic servant, coming from humble indigenous origins, it was an act of resistance that challenged ethnically and socially determined hierarchies and power relations that dominated her everyday life. Even without spoken words, it was clear that this look did not demonstrate humility but rather demanded respect. It symbolized the emergence of a new decolonized subject par excellence: a new woman who was at the point of internalizing the possibility of freedom. In this sense, it was the story of a new beginning: of a revolutionary moment in which a person who, due to her indigeneity, class, and gender, had lived her whole life subservient to someone else and had now stood up.
The story was told to me by Claudia,1 a young consultant from one of Boliviaâs many ministries, who was a close friend of the employer, someone who had ruthlessly criticized Claudia for working for the indio Evo Morales who had âmade [indigenous peoples] think too much of themselvesâ. Indigenous political uprising, she believed, was manifested in the election of peasant union leader and social movement activist Evo Morales as the first indigenous president of this impoverished, landlocked, and ethnically heterogeneous Latin American country and in the rise of his political party, Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo, MAS), into political power in December 2005. In consequence, in her view, indigenous peoples had started to behave âas if they were equalâ, an issue which seriously confused her ideas of the established social order and which was illustrated by her domestic servantâs rebellious behaviour. This incident was a testimony to new challenges faced by those working in a state bureaucracy. It highlighted how indigenous politics as a source of liberation â and the questioning of unequal, often ethnically defined, power relations â had started to play a major role in state discourses. The story also resonated with the emergence of the politics of indigeneity as a source of contestations and critical challenge within state arenas, where it had become the responsibility of state actors â ministers, vice-ministers, public servants, and consultants, amongst others â to translate these discourses into practice through concrete actions such as policy making.
This book examines the contested emergence, meanings, and use of the notion of Vivir Bien (Spanish term for âliving wellâ, Suma Qamaña in Aymara, Sumak Kawsay in Quechua2) â a conglomeration of critical ideas, worldviews, and knowledge deriving from a complex set of social movements, indigenous groups, activist networks, and scholars of indigeneity â in policy-making and state transformation processes in Andean Bolivia. It asks how the circulation of indigenous terminologies in the sphere of state bureaucracy transforms the nature of the state. While originating in social movement struggles and indigenous liberation battles, the term has been incorporated and used in state political discourses and policy making by Evo Moralesâs indigenous, peasant, and left-wing regime for more than a decade now.
Much literature on Vivir Bien â or Buen Vivir as is more commonly used outside the Bolivian context3 â as a critical cultural and ecological paradigm has already been produced (Acosta 2013; Burman forthcoming; Farah and Vasapollo 2011; GonzĂĄles Casanova and VĂĄzquez 2015; Gudynas 2011, 2013; Lalander 2016; Merino 2016; Radcliffe 2012; Ranta 2016, 2017 a; Schavelzon 2015; Vega 2011; Villalba 2013; Walsh 2010), with linkages to other alternative ideas, such as de-growth (Escobar 2015; DâAlisa, Demaria and Kallis 2015; Thomson 2011). In terms of Bolivian state policy, many of the outcomes of the shift in public policy have been critically assessed from a political-economic perspective (Cunha and Gonçalves 2010; Molero Simarro and Paz AntolĂn 2012; Webber 2011, 2016), but with little focus on indigenous terminologies apart from important recent work by Postero on the indigenous state (2013, 2017). There are also recent anthropological works on various positionalities of indigenous movements vis-Ă -vis the process of decolonization of the state (Burman 2014, 2016; Canessa 2012, 2014). In comparison to these works, this book focuses more on the internal functioning of state bureaucracy, because equally missing have been those studies examining how policy transformation is experienced, shaped, and contested by those state actors who are responsible for its translation into practice. Furthermore, scholarship suggests that instead of enhancing the cultural and ecological goals of Vivir Bien, Boliviaâs progressive government rather promotes state-led resource extractivism and centralization of state power (McNeish 2013; Ranta 2016, 2017a; Webber 2011). Consequently, there is an increasing concurrence amongst Buen Vivir/Vivir Bien scholars that its conceptual introduction into state policies has failed to produce meaningful political-economic transformations (Radcliffe 2015a, 861).
This book makes an intervention in Vivir Bien scholarship by focusing on a less studied, yet equally critical aspect: the complexities of indigenous terminologies in policy making, state bureaucracy, and governance. Instead of asking whether Bolivian policy works, it focuses on unveiling the circulation of the notion of Vivir Bien â or its indigenous equivalents â amongst key indigenous and nonindigenous actors within the state bureaucracy, such as ministers, public servants, consultants, academic scholars, development experts, and activists. It ethnographically examines how policy transformation is lived, negotiated, and disputed in multiple ways. By exploring the category of Vivir Bien, the book analyzes developments in this alternative paradigm, focusing on contradictions and contestations between the principle as a supposedly postneoliberal, indigenous category and its bureaucratic application to state-formation processes and power dynamics involving social movements. Meanwhile, treatment of the subject matter differs from that in the general literature on indigenous movement struggles and political change in two ways: first, by offering an ethnographic methodological angle from which to examine the emergence, meanings, and use of the notion of Vivir Bien inside Evo Moralesâs state bureaucracy (explained in the following sections); and second, by combining theoretically global political economy with Foucauldian governmentality and Latin American decolonial thinking (see Chapter 2). The main aim is to describe and understand the intricate and complex processes through which Vivir Bien philosophy is being translated into concrete alternative practices within the postcolonial nation-state structure â thus possibly transforming it â in the context of global political economy and our intertwined capitalist world-system.
The book also contributes to scholarship on state formation, indigenous politics, and development in the Global South. Although global and local processes are crucial to indigenous experience, this study argues that the state has increasingly become an important reference point for indigenous peoples and social movements. Through the Bolivian case, it demonstrates how the state becomes the object of transformation through the application of indigenous policy and the provision of political alternatives while at the same time acting as the subject executing the changes. In recent decades, however, the legitimacy of the study of the state has been challenged both in world politics and theoretically (Steinmetz 1999). The first challenge relates to economic globalization and the intensified global flows of people, capital, commodities, technology, and ideas over and across the borders of nation-states (Sharma and Gupta 2006b; Trouillot 2003). While the state has clearly been stripped of its previously strong roles in regulating the economy and providing social welfare by neoliberal restructurings, the intensification of state-led extractive economies and the political rise of progressive governments have turned the tide in Latin America (Grugel and Riggirozzi 2012), indicating that further analyses are needed (see, for example, Krupa and Nugent 2015). Important recent accounts on Andean postcolonial states provide inspiration for this study (Postero 2017; Radcliffe 2015b).
In respect of the theoretical challenge, a Foucauldian approach to examining power and authority redirects attention from the study of state structures and institutions to the wider functioning of power (Foucault 1980). Foucaultâs elaborations on power are used theoretically in this book to demonstrate, on the one hand, how hard it is to change neoliberal rationalities of modern state formation and, on the other, how neoliberal governmentality is being spread through assumedly universalist development models to countries like Bolivia that, due to violent histories of coloniality and capitalist exploitation, have little room to manoeuvre visĂ -vis global actors, such as International Financial Institutions (IFIs), development agencies, and transnational corporations. Vivir Bien policy is approached here through the concepts of âgovernmentâ and âneoliberal governmentalityâ, elaborated in the context of the Global South by such scholars as Ferguson (1994), Ferguson and Gupta (2005), and Li (2007). I am most specifically inspired by Liâs (2007) ethnographic work on the relationships between governmentality, development endeavours, and indigenous struggles. By utilizing a Foucauldian framework, it is argued that it is not solely the grand ideological battles or global asymmetries of power that impede the implementation of revolutionary political alternatives. In addition to these large-scale structural issues, more attention should be paid to the internal functioning of state governance and its micropractices of power in processes of change.
As a result of colonial histories, racial segregation, and transnational capitalism, Foucauldian approaches to state formation and power need to be complemented with other theoretical tools when examining formerly colonized contexts of the Global South. Latin American decolonial thinking as a regional provider of theoretical and political alternatives (Mignolo 2005; Moraña, Dussel and JĂĄuregui 2008; Quijano 2000; Walsh, GarcĂa Linera and Mignolo 2006), with salient figures such as Mignolo establishing a critical dialogue with Foucault on power and knowledge relations (Alcoff 2007), has suggested that global capitalism â and the concept of development attached to it â is deeply colonial in nature. Decolonial projects, such as promoting the notion of Vivir Bien, are perceived as vehicles for confronting and transforming coloniality, a line of argument that provides a theoretical foundation for combining global political economy with Foucauldian approaches to the state and Latin American decolonial thinking. However, the concept of coloniality of power, elaborated by Quijano and reworked by Mignolo, crystallizes how the âcolonized were subjected not simply to a rapacious exploitation of all their resources but also to a hegemony of Eurocentric knowledge systemsâ (Alcoff 2007, 83). Therefore, while conceptualizing the history of development as essentially that of global capitalism actively âunderdevelopingâ certain peoples and areas of the world, decolonial thinking complements analysis of exploitative economic bases with attention to such issues as indigeneity, ethnicity, and diverse knowledge orientations â that is, power relations in a wider perspective.
By applying the concept of decolonization to Foucauldian state-formation theorizing, this study develops the concept of âdecolonial governmentâ to emphasize the role of indigenous activists and social movements as active producers of alternative forms of governance. It examines how radical decolonial political ideals of alternative forms of governance, or what are termed here âgoverning pluralitiesâ â that is, plural political formulations governing both the state and indigenous territorial arrangements â are being translated into bureaucratic state practices. Or is it rather that the state apparatus, unintentionally perhaps, is effectively taming the active agents of pluralism â social movements and indigenous groups â by converting them into âdisciplined massesâ?
With these goals, this book maps conditions for, and the challenges of, radical political projects that aim to counteract neoliberal globalization and Western hegemony in defining development. By examining complexities and contested meanings of an alternative paradigm through lived experiences, it challenges understandings of development as rooted in global capitalism, while also demonstrating difficulties, contradictions, and exclusions that emerge in the process of transformation. Initiatives aiming at social transformation outside capitalism through local, participatory, ecological alternatives and radical collective practices have become more common in many parts of the world. Often termed ânowtopiaâ (Carlsson 2008) by activists and scholars, in distinction to the distant, futurist implications of utopia, attempts to construct concrete alternative practices in the Global North include various forms of solidarity economy, cohousing, and alternative banks, to name a few (Demaria et al. 2013).
In many parts of the Global South, where mass-scale poverty and inequalities have always been the other side of the coin of global capital accumulation, critical political alternatives and perceptions of new kinds of development host the circulation of locally rooted cultural concepts including Ubuntu in Southern Africa, Buddhist concepts in Asia (for example, the sufficiency economy in Thailand and the happiness paradigm in Bhutan), and the notion of Buen Vivir/Vivir Bien emanating from Latin America, which is associated with constructing new politics from below. Although the use of endogenous development terminologies, such as Ujamaa in Tanzania, Harambee in Kenya, and Gandhian ideas in India, has, to some extent, been common amongst postcolonial governments in Africa and Asia, the new emergence of alternative culturalist concepts appears to be a more recent reaction to contemporary times in which our global economic system has proved its dysfunctions and debilities, and in which we are increasingly concerned about the environment, climate change, and ecological sustainability. Furthermore, we are experiencing a crisis of humanity: a situation in which our social relations, our bodies, and our minds are being commoditized at an increasing pace. Development, as we know it, has reached its limits economically, environmentally, and socially.
As a response to this, Buen Vivir offers a platform for âalternatives to development focused on the good life in a broad senseâ (Gudynas 2011, 441), thus aiming for the displacement of the political economy of destructive capitalism. Capitalism, as Wallerstein (1990, 36â7) has defined it, is a polarizing system based on endless accumulation of capital, requiring the maximum appropriation of surplus value. It is fuelled by inherent contradictions, such as those between simultaneously increasing wealth and deepening poverty. Furthermore, while capitalism is based on the idea of, and belief in, universalism, it is concurrently shaped by divisive characteristics like racis...
