2019 Winner: Beyond the Duality of Sumak Kawsay: Living Well amongst the Waorani

Project Information
Beyond the Duality of Sumak Kawsay: Living Well amongst the Waorani
Social Sciences
Psych 195 (senior thesis)
The expansion of oil exploration in the Ecuadorian Amazon is synonymous with the deontologization of nature, where supposedly empty, unproductive lands and the people who have lived there for millennia must be transformed in the pursuit of development and capitalistic gains. Yet decades of oil extraction in Ecuador brought more inequality, indebtedness, environmental degradation, suffering, and social mobilization against neoliberal policies and leaders. President Rafael Correa put forth a platform of neo-extractivism, in which oil exploitation would no longer be for the benefit of corporations but instead for achieving sumak kawsay, an Indigenous concept synonymous with good living. Despite Correa’s pledges to protect and improve the quality of life of Indigenous peoples and the rights of nature encapsulated in the 2008 Constitution and various policies, I argue that the government’s underlying “developmentalist” agenda misconstrues Waorani notions of good living, dismissing subsistence livelihoods and equating modernization with urbanization and market integration. I examine changes in Waorani perceptions of quality of life between 2014 and 2018 through surveys and qualitative interviews. Data analyses reveal a suite of responses that underscore the detrimental implications of living in a community that is in transition between two realities, one centered around traditional ways of subsisting, and the other, riddled with aspects of modernization. This work speaks to the importance of understanding the in situ and ex situ implications of neo-extractivism and political discourse on the realizations of “good living.”
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Students
  • Alejandra Aviah Zeiger (Nine)
Mentors