Sumak kawsay: can ‘good living’ be written into a constitution?

My grandmother sold vegetables in a market in Lima and spoke Quechua with the other women at the stalls. When I was a boy she would sometimes say of a family, approvingly, that they lived well, allin kawsay. She did not mean they were rich. She meant something about how the household worked: that people helped each other, that the fields were looked after, that nobody was left out at the fiesta.

Many years later I heard a version of her phrase in a constitution. In 2008 Ecuador adopted a constitution whose preamble says the people have decided to build a new form of living together, in diversity and harmony with nature, to achieve good living, sumak kawsay in Kichwa. The following year Bolivia's constitution listed among the ethical principles of the state suma qamaña in Aymara, usually rendered in Spanish as vivir bien, living well, alongside other principles such as ama qhilla, ama llulla, ama suwa: do not be lazy, do not lie, do not steal.

As a teacher of history and philosophy I want to ask two questions about this. What do the words mean? And what happens to them when a state speaks them?

What "good living" is not

The first thing defenders of sumak kawsay usually say is what it is not. It is not vivir mejor, living better, the idea of endless improvement measured in income. Nor is it individual happiness. Sumak means something like beautiful, full or excellent, and kawsay is life, but the life in question is the life of a community, which includes the land, the animals, the mountains and the dead.

The Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch, who did much of his fieldwork among Quechua and Aymara communities in the Andes, tried to describe the difference through the two Spanish verbs for "to be". European thought, he argued, is a philosophy of ser, of being something, of identity and achievement. Andean life is closer to estar, being somewhere, being situated, a way of existing attuned to place, season and the unpredictable. His Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América is difficult but rewarding. You do not need to accept all of Kusch's contrasts, which can be too neat, to see the point. Good living here is not a state a person reaches. It is a way a community keeps its relations in order.

That is why reciprocity is central. The Andean practice of ayni, help returned in kind, which Lucía Mamani asked about here today, is not a side custom. It is the economy of good living: labour, food and care circulating so that nobody hoards and nobody falls.

Comparisons that help, and one that misleads

The obvious comparison is with Aristotle. Eudaimonia, in the Nicomachean Ethics, is also not a feeling but an activity: a whole life lived well, in a political community, in accordance with virtue. Aristotle also distrusted the endless pursuit of wealth for its own sake, which he thought confused means with ends.

But the comparison misleads in one way. Aristotle's good life belongs to the free male citizen, and nature is the background against which it is lived. In sumak kawsay, nature is a participant. That is why the same Ecuadorian constitution became the first in the world to give rights to nature itself, to Pacha Mama.

A second comparison is with Amartya Sen's capabilities approach, which also rejects income as the measure of how well people live and asks instead what they are actually able to do and be. Sen is closer to sumak kawsay than most development economics, but his approach is still built around individual freedoms. The Andean idea starts from the household and the community.

Our own José Carlos Mariátegui, writing in the 1920s, saw in the surviving Andean communities, the ayllus, a living tradition of cooperation that a modern socialism could build on rather than sweep away. He has been accused of romanticising them. So have the authors of the new constitutions.

When the state speaks the words

Here is my worry. A phrase from my grandmother's kitchen now appears in national development plans, ministry names and political speeches. When a state adopts a word, it also acquires the power to decide what the word means.

Ecuador offers a hard example. In 2007 its government proposed to leave untouched the oil beneath part of Yasuní National Park, one of the most biodiverse places on earth, if other countries contributed part of its value. In 2013, with too little money raised, the plan was abandoned. Supporters of drilling argued that oil revenue would pay for schools, roads and hospitals, which is to say, for good living. Critics answered that this was vivir mejor wearing the clothes of sumak kawsay. Alberto Acosta, who presided over the constituent assembly for most of its work, became one of the sharpest critics of the government on exactly this point.

I don't think this shows the idea is empty. It shows what any ethical idea faces when it enters law. Once it is in a constitution, people can appeal to it against the government, as Tomás Echeverría and others do in court. That is real. But they can also be told by the government what it means.

What I tell my students

My students in Lima mostly live in a city of some ten million people, far from any ayllu. Some of them hear sumak kawsay as their grandparents' world turned into a slogan. Others hear it as the first time a state has said that their grandparents' ideas count as ideas.

I tell them both are right. A philosophy of good living cannot be decreed. But it can be remembered in public, argued about, and used against those who decree. My grandmother would have been surprised to find her phrase in a constitution. I think she would also have asked, very practically, whether anyone was being left out at the fiesta.