Session 66 summary
Jenny is from Ecuador, mestizo-mix of Spaniards and indigenous people and because of her biography she has contact with many Ecuadorian indigenous people. So, she has the contact and access to the Kichwa people of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian amazon. It has been 2 years and she has been doing collaborative research with them. In her research, she basically approaches the law from an anthropological perspective which has been very challenging for her to define what the normative context is and to discuss with lawyers what are cosmologies and to read this cosmologies as law and as something normative as to how to manage, for e.g. a territory and let UN to institutions in indigenous territories. The constitution of Ecuador is not only progressive but it also has so many principles that have been recognized since these are all struggle of peoples and nations in the country. Many elements have been recognized in a long struggle since 1992 officially but every year it has been either some sort of recognition and then the product of these was the constitution of 2008, this was recognized through a national assembly and through what people could vote for the constitution which actually happens in Chile. So they are really connected with Chile because this would be the second country if this constitution is approved to recognize the rights of nature in the constitution. The constitution of Chile, this proposal that the waters are going to reside on had a sort of feminine elements this is not more likely in the Ecuadorian constitution but still there were recognized ‘pacha-mama’(mother nature) with rights. Also nationality in terms of morality, collective rights etc. when looking at the preamble of the Ecuadorian constitution, it can be seen how open it is. It is seen that the ‘good way of living’ and the concept of sumak kawsay, there have been a lot of critiques of this notion why it has only been translated to Kichwa? Because it has different meanings in indigenous languages. It can be seen the concept of ‘good living’ is intertwined with the different principles, the rights that were recognized and so together with the rights of good living they have the rights of communities, people and nations, rights to participation, rights to freedom and rights of nature is also part of these so all of these rights are intertwined. The concept of good living ‘Buen Vivir’ cannot be thought alone without these rights. She chose a couple of articles to get an idea of the Ecuadorian constitution. For e.g. in Article 1 of the Ecuadorian constitution, recently in 2022 the country is recognized in the constitution that there are other nations there, this was recognized already in Ecuador many years ago. Also in article 2 that there is Spanish is Ecuador’s official language, Spanish, kichwa and shuar are also official languages. So, there is different kinds of inclusions in the constitution and also again the good way of living appear in many articles of the constitution. Another article which she chose is article 10 where it is written “persons, communities, peoples, nations and communities are bearers of rights and shall enjoy the rights guaranteed to them in the constitution and in international instruments. Nature shall be the subject of those rights that the constitution recognizes for it.” She is not focusing on the rights of nature but the topic is intertwined with the concept of good living. Chapter 2 is about the rights of good way of living- how it is expressed, there is articles 12, as part of this whole asset of good living a different dimension of life or rights for example part of this good way of living is the ‘human right to water’ (article 12) but also article 14 ‘the right of the population to live in a healthy and ecologically balanced environment’ which a couple of countries are recently recognizing that. All of these are the part of the assets and when one reads also expresses in different dimensions of life like education (article 26) which is also a condition for good living and also related to matters of health. So it is seen that this concept is very broad but the idea is that it is applied not only to manage and bring harmony with nature but also with other dimensions like education and health. An important chapter of good living is related to natural resources and biodiversity.
It is important to know who coined this concept and where did this concept come from, and it is interesting because there are many sources where this concept was coined actually by a person from Sarayaku i.e. from the community with whom Jenny is doing her collaborative research. The name of this person is Carlos Viteri Gualinga and he is an anthropologist and it was the first time that he put a report that he did in early 2000 where he wrote the concept of sumak kawsay- good living. This was the beginning of this concept and it was laid as such but that doesn’t mean that the practise of good living hasn’t been taken part in early on. It was just this concept, defining the concept. So, it is also a bit contested when this concept came and it is interesting because this concept was already written for e.g. in the ethnography of Philippe Descola, an important anthropologist of the amazon. He already wrote in ‘La Selva Culta’ the concept of ‘shiir waras’ which is the concept of good living, so it was even before Carlos Viteri Gualinga wrote about the concept. Sometimes when discussing about where this concept came from and who taught it because at the end one discusses the importance of the concept and get lost where the local pronunciation of this concept is from. As Jenny was saying, the concept is recognized in the constitution with the kechwa terminology, the Macau side, since most of the people in Ecuador nation speak the kechwa language, but for e.g. the case of Bolivia where it was already recognized which is ‘suma qamana’ in Ayamara, ‘kume morgen’ in Chilean mapuche, people living in the city are trying to be creative how this good living should be expressed in the city. There is an anthropologist called Andrea Bravo Diaz she wrote an article where she is contrasting the notion of ‘Buen Vivir’ in the constitution and the notion of warani (peoples and nations group in Ecuador) who have the notion of ‘waponi kewemonipa’. This concept is good living but is specifically peace, collective happiness and it contains also certain ecological experiences. So, it can be seen how this concept has a major layer but in every local pronunciation it is expressed differently depending on how we relate to that concept and maybe to a specific territory and in this sense this concept has been a lot and it has been a hybrid. There has also been a lot of indigenous people that haven’t had this concept before but for their own struggles they have adopted this concept and also as part of this struggle. It is okay that one doesn’t delve in ‘where was the local pronunciation of the concept?’ because everyone is going to practise it different, as many people may practice the concept without labelling it as ‘Buen Vivir’.
How is this concept enacted in specific territory (in amazon)? ‘Buen Vivir’ is directly related to the concept and the notion or instruments of life plans. When we think about life plans there is much little about this life plans normally regulate how people interact with the territory in different dimension. The notion of life plans is also related to these radically rethinking of the rights of justice. How does this concept look like in the territory of Sarayaku? It is one of the most developed notions of ‘Buen Vivir’ Jenny has seen, since sometimes this concept remains empty because it can be many different thing and expressed in many dimensions of life. In Sarayaku specifically the concept of ‘Buen Vivir’ has three pillars, the first pillar is ‘Sacha Runa Yachay’ which is the knowledge of the Amazonian being or as Jenny calls it kindred knowledge. And in ‘Sacha Runa Yachay’ they have education, traditional medicine, indigenous justice, cultural festivity, even how one prepares the clay pottery. Then they have the principle of ‘Sumak Allpa’ (2nd Pillar) which is land without evil and there they have how the territories are divided, the specific songs, they have Sisa Nampi and they have the Kawsak Sacha Declaration. And the last pillar is the ‘Runakuna Kawsay’ which is literally translated to life of the people. The Sarayaku, they are always developing more and more of their concepts and now they want to include in this notion of ‘Runakuna Kawsay’ which includes solidarity of the economy, handing our chakra (traditional agricultural field) into our soils but also the political organizations of the community. Sometimes Jenny finds it difficult to really separate these three pillars, so something which she admires in Sarayaku is that they manage to grab and differentiate these three pillars. What Jenny does in her research is that she can see the forest as the source of law. For her the normative can be engraved in the forest and it can be engraved in the stories of the forest and it is not only the human who is creating the law. The constitution has a large part of the concept of good living but it also has other sides, for e.g. article 407 where if something is declared as a national interest by the country then these national interest is over the rights of nature so, in Ecuador there is no hierarchy like rights of people is higher than the rights of nature. Also they have this article which is the trickiest article, Article 408 which states that all the subsoil resources in the country belong to the state- a property of the state which stands in contradiction to other rights that are provided.
About the Speaker
Jenny García Ruales
Jenny García Ruales is an Ecuadorian doctoral candidate in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Philipps University of Marburg, an associate researcher at the fellow group “Environmental Rights in a Cultural Context” at the Max-Planck-Institute (MPI) for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), and a doctoral fellow of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. Jenny’s doctoral topic is situated in the fields of Environmental Anthropology, Anthropology of Nature, and Legal Anthropology. Her research shall contribute to the processes of pursuing an eco-centric legal system in the (Ecuadorian) Amazon and of recognizing the rights of natural entities. To this end, she explores the legal proposal of the Kichwa People of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon and their animist perceptions of the environment.
