Ayni and Neltilitztli: The reconstitutions of the destituted

Abstract

“Market” in the past 500 years became synonymous with “capitalist market” (mercantile economy, industrial economy, technological and financial economy, market democracy). Before 1500 all organization of people living together (civilizations or cultures) had their own places to exchange within the communal and between nearby communities, all over the planet, not only in Europe. They did not go away. They are not pre-capitalist places of exchange. They are co-existing non-capitalist places of exchange. “Market” is the word used—since the 12 century—in Western vernacular languages to name the place of a meeting at a fixed time for exchanging livestock and provisions. By the 12th century medieval European “markets” where equivalent to all existing similar places of exchanges among co-existing civilizations. The constitution of the Western modern/colonial “market” in the 16th century (an experience the Adam Smith theorized in the second half of the eighteenth century), destituted all existing equivalent places of exchange. The task now is the decolonial reconstitution of communal places exchanges, reconstitution that is already under way, which implies gnoseological (knowing) and aesthesic (sensing, emotioning) praxis of living.