"No to Mining Yes to Life": An Ethnographic Account of Buen Vivir in Postneoliberal Ecuador
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At a time of heightened, global conflict over resource extraction, the Intag valley, Ecuador is an exemplary case of long-term mining resistance, halting the development of a mega-mining project for over two decades. Significantly, extractive politics in Intag mobilizes a politics of life, a shift from protests of the past that have employed a politics of labor. The politics of life uses a relational worldview where assuring livelihoods goes hand in hand with the reproduction of nature. This has unfolded within the landscape of postneoliberal Ecuadorian politics, where the state has asserted its role in extractive development. President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) rejected neoliberal political economy in favor of a model adapted from the Quechua life philosophy, sumak kawsay (buen vivir or good living) -which prioritizes (non)human well-being. But, the buen vivir political project is at odds with the economic model of the postneoliberal state, neoextractivism –a type of resource nationalism. Considering the importance of communities and the state as negotiators of mega-mining projects under the neoextractivist model, as well the propensity of these two groups to have conflicting objectives, my research follows state-led development programs, from the vantage point of Intag. I ask how are the politics of life used to legitimize neoextractivism? I contend that the legitimacy of the postneoliberal era hinges on buen vivir -an emergent conceptual apparatus. A conceptual apparatus is a purposefully crafted political ideal that congeals a set of objectively desirable values and meanings that justify a political economic model of development, both enabling and inhibiting politics. Intag is a place where two spectral forces -the utopian ideal of buen vivir and the mine that has never been -saturate sociality and politics. It is a place where what it means to live well, and how this can best be achieved, is debated and informs everyday practice. Once a place defined by its remoteness, Intag is exactly the kind of place that the postneoliberal state has sought to bring into its orbit. My exploration of the politics of life traces how meanings of buen vivir are contested, negotiated, and fixed by the postneoliberal state and Inteños.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".