Local Responses to Global Change: Community Alternatives for ‘Good Living’ in Latin America

Abstract

This chapter examines the process that went into developing constructive strategies to facilitate the survival of the hundreds of ethnic groups that continue to inhabit the highlands of Latin America. Many of these productive and cultural building blocks have endured until today, undergoing a continuing process of adaption, the result of culling of old practices that proved to be obstacles to survival and of integrating new discoveries, accumulating knowledge, and the direct appropriation of contributions from other communities and other social systems, including the very peoples who might be threatening them.