Aja Shuar and agroecological pathways: between 'rifts' and possible horizons from the ecuadorian Amazon

Abstract

In this article, through community action-participation, we seek to observe community and political-organizational processes, which face a public policy marked by the alliance between State and company. This has negatively impacted several areas, where mining projects of different sizes have been installed, making other forms of life unviable and dysfunctional in transnational global capitalism, especially in its logic of “accumulation by dispossession”. We focus on a qualitative analysis of practices that illuminate a possible economic solution, of resistance and re-existence, in contexts of mining dispossession in the south of the Ecuadorian Amazon. El aja shuar opens some paths that will be analyzed as “horizons of possibilities” opened from the Cordillera del Cóndor. We take the concept of metabolic fracture or rift, developed by J. Bellamy Foster, to reflect on the rift metabolic assumption of contemporary capitalism from a specific and punctual locus, but quite emblematic, for the threats imposed on its agrobiodiversity and on modes of life of an indigenous nationality that seeks to overcome internal divisions and mitigate, from its potentialities agroecological, socio-environmental damage, promoting a more harmonious and regenerative relationship between human production and ecosystems.