Communal lands, socio-territorial transformations and Good Living practices in the Amaichas Community

Abstract

This paper analyses the previous and nowadays context in which practices related the Good Living principles took and are taking place. It also focusses in the centrality of communal lands had in these processes. The end of migration to the sugar harvest in mid-1970s put an end to development models that had mold community life since the Nineteenth Century. By the 1980s and 1990s other phases of capital development once again disarticulated community logics, but made identities evident.The recognition of cultural diversity and the use of state policies demanded legal distinctions, stories and cultural practices from the amaichas. In order to accomplish the proceedings, they re-created local knowledge and intellectual discourses about indigenous people. This mediated return of the indigenous people would also propitiate the search of alternative developments or alternatives to development, like the Good Living proposals.