Current Research Projects

Spiritual Knowledge From Food Production As Principal Aspect To “Buen Vivir”

LINPR Research Project Summary
By Carla Narbaiza
21 April 2022

From the Andean and Amazonian regions of South America a new knowledge is emerging related to other values from nature and human beings. This is an intercultural vision, as it expresses a confluence of knowledges, rationalities and sensibilities from critiques within or at the margin of modernity. This new knowledge is related to the plural concept of “Buen Vivir”. It is still under construction, and it appears as “an alternative” to development, understanding it as increasing economic and social benefits. “Buen Vivir” introduces a new concept where nature and humanity are equal and they have the same rights. Therefore, they propose an alternative to the way of life, based on their ancestral and cultural knowledge, in harmony with nature. In other words, “Buen Vivir” means being in full harmony with the other, with the community, with Mother Earth, with the other living beings of the Pachamama. It is living and developing life in correspondence, reciprocity, complementarity, spirituality, integrality, and harmony with the community of life, understood as the unity and structure of life.

The present project, from an intercultural perspective, criticizes the project of modern, scientific-technical civilization, where the utilitarian valuation of nature over the spiritual one prevails, on which the different development projects are sustained, including the attempts to make them sustainable. So, the relevance of this research is in recognizing that the existence of ancestral memories represents a challenge for the hegemonic perspective of knowledge and overcoming it will allow us to contribute “alternative” knowledge to the concepts inherited from the West. Because these ancestral memories reject the present civilization project, being able to listen to and understand them will validate the production of food that points to “Buen vivir”.

Is it possible for developed countries to understand the concept of “Buen Vivir”? How can this knowledge be used to produce food for a new form of life that contributes to “Buen Vivir”? The answers to these questions can guide us to respond to other questions such as: What can “this territory” produce that aims to “Buen vivir”? Which is the knowledge that allows us to “feel” with the earth? What kind of knowledge is it necessary to rescue to achieve a production that allows us to connect with the “land”, which in addition to food and support, gives us wisdom?

The originality and innovation of this research is in the recovery of the traditional knowledge about food production of the oldest civilizations, in order to connect the memory of the territory, with the current and future needs of its population. This project contributes to making sense of spiritual needs as integral to the human being and to achieve the longed for development, hence making advances within the development research area, which in the widest view of sustainability focus only on the material, social and environmental, leaving aside cosmological function of human being.

The ancestral memories, present in each territory, are linked to the feeling with nature. Recovering them separates us from the instrumental vision we have of nature. “To feel” nature is to learn to perceive and vibrate in tune with it. Deepening this spiritual knowledge gives us the opportunity to seek that balance that allows us to know nature in a different way, thus letting us deal with the crisis of knowledge that we face as a civilization. That feeling vibrates in the body of each being and transcends the belief system, dogmas and fundamental truths of both science and religion.