ABSTRACT
Capitalist coloniality has produced multiple crises in our minds, bodies, and social relations by commoditizing wellbeing. Our sense of belonging, collective responsibility, and conviviality with other human and earth beings has been miserably deprived. This chapter explores the decolonizing potential of new forms of conviviality as alternatives to the crisis for humanity and the biophysical environment in the Global South. Most specifically it focuses on examining the multiple dimensions of the notion of Buen Vivir/Vivir Bien (“living well”), a conceptualization of the Indigenous living world and a political project in the Latin American Andes that connotes a condition of mutual interdependence between individuals, the community, and nature. The chapter investigates how this transformative alternative can provide us with systemic solutions to questions of integral wellbeing through solidarity, a sense of community, ecological knowledge, and sustainability, as opposed to the aggravated individualism and exclusions of capitalist coloniality. It argues that the main strength of Buen Vivir is its extension of the concept of conviviality from the sphere of humans to humans and non-humans. The chapter also discusses its conceptual and political contradictions, limitations, and failures, especially with regard to its co-option to state agendas in Bolivia and Ecuador.
