Prefiguring buen sobrevivir: Lenca women’s (e)utopianism amid climate change

ABSTRACT

Given its utopian orientation, the anti-capitalist, decolonial notion of buen vivir understates how precarious life is for those who experiment with practicing its principles. Furthermore, climate change and climate mitigation will exacerbate precarity for the foreseeable future. In response, we develop a conceptual argument that integrates concepts from post-extractivism, climate adaptation, communitarian feminism, and prefigurative politics for a more accurate and more actionable, eutopian concept we term buen sobrevivir, or surviving well. We then illustrate the concept through Lenca women’s struggles to make alternatives possible in the face of violent extractivism, patriarchy, and climate change impacts in post-coup Honduras.

KEYWORDS:

• Buen vivir
• post-extractivism
• communitarian feminism
• prefigurative politics
• Honduras

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Tony Bebbington and Jody Emel as well as four anonymous reviewers for their comments, Denise Humphreys Bebbington for inviting us to present the paper at Extractives@Clark, and fellow members of the Movimiento Ambientalista SantaBarbarense and Coalición Ambientalista de Copán for their dedication, camaraderie, and trust.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For Fraser (2021, 126), ‘trans-environmentalism’ consists of an eco-politics that incorporates ‘labour rights, feminism, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, class consciousness, pro-democracy, anti-consumerism, anti-extractivism’.

2 Focusing on both Europe and India, Agarwal provides a similar intervention in arguing that ecofeminist characterizations of the origins of patriarchy problematically paint a picture of a pre-colonial past free of patriarchy when the evidence suggests ‘a hierarchical construction of male-female relationships’ (Agarwal 1998, 67).

3 Lenca territory has been documented as stretching over parts of at least nine of Honduras’s 18 departments (UNAH et al. 2021).

4 In the Spanish language, all nouns are gendered.

5 Given MAS’s model as an umbrella of community-based organizations, the organization operates through various groups in Chinda, including the women’s network, water councils, and an environmental organization called Comunidades Unidas.

Additional information

Funding

Fash’s work was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program [grant number 1945996], the Fulbright Commission, the Institute for Human Geography, Clark University, and the Conference of Latin American Geography. Fash and Sojob's collaborative work was supported by the Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía.

Notes on contributors

Benjamin C. Fash

Benjamin C. Fash earned his Ph.D. in Geography at Clark University. He has authored several texts on resource extraction politics and social movements in Honduras, and is co-founder of Cine Bolomchon.

Betty del Carmen Vásquez Rivera

Betty Vásquez is a Lenca defender of territory and human rights, and co-founder and coordinator of the Movimiento Ambientalista SantaBarbarense (MAS).

María Sojob

María Sojob is a Tsotsil filmmaker, member of the National System of Creators of Art in Mexico, and co-founder of Cine Bolomchon.