What does it mean to ‘live well’? The contentious politics of vivir bien as alternative development

Abstract

Vivir bien is widely used by academics, activists, and governments of the Latin American ‘Pink Tide’ to refer to alternatives to conventional economic development based on indigenous worldviews claimed to oppose capitalist modernity. Through ethnography of local politics within a Bolivian Quechua community, this article explores how the term has been vernacularized and contested among local leaders, illustrating that their understandings of development and ‘living well’ do not reflect a binary opposition between ‘Western’ and ‘indigenous’ ways of being. Debates concerning vivir bien instead express varied notions of self‐government and aspirations for autonomy informed by centuries of struggle as colonized peoples.