Everybody wants to live a good life, but how many people understand what a good life is?
Good life is a very complex and controversial concept, which has different meanings for different people. Good life is usually referred in academic world as Well-being (WB) and this interesting topic is part of my research, which of course is related with Latin America and this is why I decided to write about it. The research on Well-being has a long history, which includes a great deal of debate in terms of defining what constitutes a good life or what makes an experience optimal. The way Well-being is defined by people influences the way they behave and also influences their values and how society can be organized.
Recently, I went back to my country Ecuador in order to collect data for my research, which as I mentioned is related with Well-being, more specifically with the indigenous ancient way of living called ‘Sumak Kawsay’ a term which comes from the Quechua Language and describes a way of living in harmony with nature, a way which was practiced by indigenous people in ancient Andean region.
This concept was introduced in the Ecuadorian and Bolivian Constitutions as an attempt to recover some of the views of our ancestors in terms of how a society should be organized in order to provide enough material and non-material goods for everybody, but also as an alternative to free market capitalism, very widespread across Latin America especially during the 1990s due to the Washington Consensus. However, as many of you know this situation dramatically changed during the beginning of the Twenty-First Century.
For many of us the term ‘pink tide’ is not unfamiliar, however just in case you’ve been living under a rock I would like to remind you that the term refers to the emergence leftish ideology in Latin American governments. It has been also being defined as ‘turn to the Left’. Many people think that leftish governments in Latin America and the so called Twenty-First Century Socialism will reverse all the neoliberal policies implemented in the 1990s and focus more on human Well-being. At first it looked like there was a shift in development thinking. However, more than 15 years later, and the fact that in some countries left-leaning parties have been in power for more than a decade show that the expected results haven’t been accomplished.
During my fieldwork in Ecuador, I could find evidence of important changes in many social areas, such as education (including scholarships, this is why I am here) and health, people also told me about the country’s highway system, now one of the best within the region, they also talked about how public services experienced a remarkable improvement in the last few years. But something is lacking in Ecuador and in Latin America in general, people are not experiencing the good life, but this makes me ask myself again what is a good life?
I was hoping to find the answer, by exploring the concept of ‘Sumak Kawsay’. Perhaps the ancient way of living, in harmony with nature, was the answer. However, what I found was different perceptions and different points of views, just like we find in the literature of Well-being. One indigenous academic lady helped me to understand the situation in Latin America. She said, when the Spaniards conquered the Americas they destroyed our way of living and they imposed their own religion, culture and traditions; this rupture makes it very difficult for people to find their path for a good life, because they live between two worlds, the one in their blood and the one imposed by the western way of living. This maybe explains why indigenous people in Ecuador feel betrayed and also provides some understanding of the recent results in the Venezuela and Argentina elections, which suggests a turning to the Right.
Just like one BBC article pointed out: Pink tide is coming to the end but this is not a question of Left and Right parties, I think it is because we don’t know yet what the good life means, and because we haven’t reconciled our indigenous roots with our Spanish heritage.
