By linking nature and culture in a relationship of mutual presupposition or basic indistinctiveness, the framework of buen vivir seems to offer a “sustainable” alternative to the exploitation of the biophysical world and human communities that neoliberal globalization is taking to the extreme. Buen vivir, however, is an “invented tradition”, still under elaboration. Indigenous cultures are read in the light of most recent developments in social theory, which connect emancipatory practices and deconstruction of classic ontologies. On their side, new post-constructivist ontologies (this contribution focuses on feminist “new materialism”) build to a remarkable extent on the conceptualizations of nature provided by technoscience, which in their turn are attuned to neoliberal rationality. One may wonder, therefore, if the post-constructivist approach is pointing to a target of decreasing significance, while failing to acknowledge its own alignment with the vision of nature that underlies neoliberal policies. In any case, buen vivir remains a promising framework, especially in regard to its grafting onto a worldview that differs profoundly from the one which underpins both the greedy individualism of neoliberalism and the decentred post-humanism of contemporary social theory.
