A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

The food crisis, traditional medicine and respect for nature
To achieve buen vivir it is necessary to guarantee the exercise of collective
rights, but also to promote forms of participatory production and
productive networks, as well as preventing the proliferation of monocultures
that is displacing the Ecuadorian Afro-descendants and, instead,
to create openings for markets based on fair trade.
Knowledge about traditional health cures, food, organizing bio-diversity,
the know-how of midwives about childbirth, inter alia, involves selfknowledge
and they must be re-valued for the survival of a population.
The different meanings of water, the sense of land and co-existence
should be treated as a whole, seen as open and continuing paths. They
must be constantly brought up to date because the problem about the
‘Common Good of Humanity’ is how to include methodologically all the
horizontal diversities.
Thus, for example, the traditional knowledge of herbal medicine, like the
medicinal plants that help to cure fright, to calm pain and aching eyes
and to treat polluted air (? has been verified by Western science. We
should remember that allopathic medicine was based on herbs. In the
Afro-descendant cultures people can be cured by song: listening to the
voices of ancestors, of the family, of the community, to exercise empowerment,
not only of the individual but also of the collective, both
public and private, sacred and profane, intimate, emotive, affective, social:
what Patricio Guerrero refers to as corazonar, the link between the
mind and the heart.
The climate and energy crisis: the rights of culturaleza 140
The environmental crisis has come about because of a model of civilization
that is based on combustible fuels, which has caused the greatest
disaster in the history of humanity. And we cannot tackle it with solutions
based on the market, as proposed by the Convention on Climate
140 As advocated by the Mexican anthropologist Raúl González who, in the context
of proposals about Complexity, has created this neologism that expresses the intrinsic
link between naturaleza and cultura. See ‘La producción y reproducción de
sentidos de los simbolos elementales de la culturaleza’ in La arquitectura del sentido.
Julieta Haidar (coordinator), Escuela Nacional de Antropología y Historia, Mexico
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