Las Representaciones Sociales del Buen Vivir en las Ecoaldeas: el Caso de Aldeafeliz, San Francisco, Cundinamarca

Abstract

The present study approaches the social representations of Buen Vivir in the members of the Aldeafeliz community, San Francisco, Cundinamarca. It is an intentional community, that is, that its members have voluntarily decided to migrate from the city to the countryside in search of a "better life" in community, that is, with a group of people organized with interests and common objectives in a territory shared with the desire to remain in time. In the worldview of some native peoples of central and southern America, this "better life" is defined from the concept of Buen Vivir, whose first principle is harmonious coexistence and balanced with the environment. From such cosmovisions, initiatives against hegemonics and environmental discourses have used the notion of Good Living to formulate alternatives to the logics of capitalism. From now on we will analyze the encounters and disagreements between the social representations of the Aldeafeliz intriguers on Good Living and other notions of good life, between discourses derived from original worldviews and those raised by the community itself. This comparison will lead us to ask questions such as: What notions exist around the concept of Good Living? Do the members of Aldeafeliz possess new or equal ideals of life to those proposed in other similar discourses? Do their representations, which extend to their practices, actually show themselves as an alternative to the prevailing ways of life or, on the contrary, are only a manifestation of the neoliberal economic system? To answer these questions, this research is part of the field study, whose direct technique is direct observation and semistructured interviews, since there is no definite theoretical construct within the Aldeafeliz of the notion Buen Vivir that can be reached by a different from the analysis of their practices. This analysis will lead us to understand that the social representations of the subjects in reference do not properly constitute an alternative way to the capitalist way of life, but an expression of the same.