Abstract

This article aims to integrate and systematise the authors’ previous work on Latin American buen vivir discourses. Taking a post-structuralist perspective, it emphasises the historicity and inner contradictions within different buen vivir discourses and the role of their various proponents. In so doing, the article identifies the many diverse meanings implicit in the term buen vivir in Latin America. In particular, it argues that there are five distinct meanings - primordial, hybrid, indigenist, statist/socialist, and post-developmentalist - which correspond to three different phases in the history of the term - emergence, assemblage, and dislocation - helping to explain the progressive re-signification of the buen vivir over time.