A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

sist control of their collective imagination. This proposition implies, however,
a challenge to the political and theoretical imagination. If indigenous
cultures contain “foundational concepts” that “inspire contemporary social
thought and organisation”, an obligatory question is how to take
those foundational concepts in an intercultural conceptual elaboration,
while at the same time demonstrating an ethical attitude of solidarity
that does not silence the voice of indigenous people. A necessary departure
point in this ethical attitude must be an awareness that concepts
such as sumak kawsay (good living), or Pachamama (Mother Earth), persistently
cited in liberation discourse, cannot be fully understood outside
their cultural context, unconnected to a semantic and conceptual whole
of which they form a systemic part. This anxiety, it is worth clarifying, is
far removed from an essentialist attitude that seeks to defend a supposedly
inaccessible conceptual purity. It is rather a matter of drawing
attention to a necessary sensibility towards what “to speak for” and “to
speak to” mean in terms of power and knowledge production. In fact,
the same condition of imagining and constructing something new depends
on tackling the matter of translation not solely in technical-linguistic
terms but above all in terms of culture and political relations.
Interculturalism, as it has been imagined by indigenous peoples, assumes
an open horizon for the spread of cultural practices postulated
as their own 145 while at the same time expressing the willingness to
learn from other peoples. The possibility for the transculturation of ideas
cannot ignore that they originate in practices, desires and expectations
that have a specific cultural and historical locus. I believe that one way
of entering the collective imaginations in which those practices and concepts
are rendered meaningful is the universe of local oral narratives.
We will see briefly what such narratives can tell us by analysing a Kichwa
story. 146
145 Dolores Cacuango, an indigenous leader from the north of Ecuador in the first
half of the twentieth century, put forward a fundamental proposition in the orientation
of the indigenous peoples’ political project: “We’re like the high moorland
grass that is cut and grows again; we’ll sow the world with tall grass.”
146 I will use Kichwa to refer to the dialectal variant Ecuadorian Kichwa, and
Quechua when referring to the whole linguistic community.
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