Workshop: Indigenous logics – Indigenous economies: Perspectives from the Andean Americas Workshop: Indigenous logics – Indigenous economies: Perspectives from the Andean Americas

Capitalism - founded on principles such as private property, self-interest, competition andmarket mechanism - has been described as the “most gigantic, totalizing, and all-encompassing universal system of evaluation known to human history” (Graeber 2001).Consequently, it has been critiqued and indeed attacked throughout its history, amongothers, from Marxist to anarchist, feminist and post-colonial positions. Some of thealternatives presented are grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. The caseof Vivir Bien, pursued as official government philosophy by the Plurinational State ofBolivia, is a prominent example. This state version of Vivir Bien promotes values that areconsidered to be alternatives to, or opposites of, the capitalist model, such as acommunitarian (distributive) economy, balance with nature, complementarity betweenmen and women, and an anti-individualistic consciousness. Yet, capitalist structures,processes and practices are still around, including those enacted and perpetuated byIndigenous actors, such as Aymara traders in the very state of Bolivia.The workshop tackles this conundrum. Rather than opposing capitalism to unviable andromanticising alternatives, we seek ways in which different logics operate and intersect,and different values get inflected and reconfigured. More specifically, the workshop setsout to dig deep into Indigenous logics through which Indigenous economies come intobeing. For example, the economic activities of Aymara traders are based on moralconcepts, material transfers, social interactions and local institutions, which are groundedin and enacted through particular cosmological frameworks and domains of subalternity,and which correspond with, but at the same time differ from, conventional marketmechanisms and hegemonic trends of capitalist accumulation.We invite further historically, ethnographically and theoretically informed perspectivesfrom across the Andean Americas aimed at gearing the apparently “all-encompassinguniversal system of evaluation” towards particular instantiations, which offer alternativesthrough economic structures, processes and practices themselves, for example in theirmultifaceted relations to people, other-than-human beings and environments.