--- title: "Where the Word 'Resource' Has No Place" sousTitre: "In the Andean highlands, the *ayllu* does not merely name the human village—it is the extended community of all that lives. Fernando Huanacuni Mamani puts it plainly: in the *ayllu*, the word 'resource' has no place." description: "The Aymara *ayllu*—the community that includes animals, plants, mountains, waters, and ancestors—does not recognize the concept of 'resource.' According to Fernando Huanacuni Mamani (CAOI), where everything lives, what exists are beings, not objects." date: 2026-07-02 lang: en tradition: aymara auteurs: ["Fernando Huanacuni Mamani"] --- # Where the Word 'Resource' Has No Place Natural resource, natural capital, sustainable resource management: our language files the living under what serves. A resource is a reserve—something to be extracted, managed, optimized. Even when we seek to protect it, we speak of it as a stock to be husbanded, entered somewhere in an accounting ledger. In the Andean highlands, around Lake Titicaca, an Aymara word organizes the world differently, and this word leaves no room for "resource": *ayllu*. The Aymara jurist and writer Fernando Huanacuni Mamani, who has gathered its meaning for an Andean Indigenous organization, the CAOI, begins by warning that it is poorly translated. *Ayllu*, he says, is usually rendered as "community"—but the Spanish word, like ours, falls short. For the West, a community is a "social unit and structure": it is made of humans. What Aymara calls *ayllu* is of another order. el ser humano es sólo una parte de esta unidad; animales, insectos, plantas, montañas, el aire, el agua, el sol, incluso lo que no se ve, nuestros ancestros y otros seres, son parte de la comunidad. the human being is only one part of this unity; animals, insects, plants, mountains, air, water, the sun—even what cannot be seen, our ancestors and other beings—are part of the community. Here, community is not the society of persons; it is the unity of all that lives. The human does not occupy its center but holds a thread within it. And from this expanse follows a consequence Huanacuni draws without hesitation: if everything in the *ayllu* belongs to the community of the living, then nothing is available as a thing. En el ayllu no hay lugar para el término "recurso", ya que si todo vive, lo que existe son seres y no objetos, y el ser humano no es el único parámetro de vida ni es el rey de la creación. In the *ayllu*, there is no place for the term "resource," for if everything lives, what exists are beings, not objects—and the human being is neither the sole measure of life nor the king of creation. The reasoning is brief and holds entirely. A resource is an object intended for use; yet in the *ayllu*, there are no objects—only beings. The mountain, the water, the insect, the ancestor are not reserves at humanity’s disposal, for the human is not the point from which the value of what exists is measured. Remove this center, and the word "resource" loses its ground: it no longer designates anything. *[ayllu]* *Ayllu* is a loanword from Aymara—shared with Quechua—and not a neologism: in the Andes, it names the living unity that organizes communal existence. "Community" is our approximate rendering, just as "comunidad" is in Spanish, as Huanacuni himself acknowledges. The synthesis comes from a named Indigenous voice, Fernando Huanacuni Mamani, relayed by an accountable Andean Indigenous organization, the CAOI: "according to Huanacuni / the CAOI," never "the Aymara say." One might be tempted to see in this our own concern for the living—ecology, sustainable management, care for "nature." The resemblance deserves to be kept at arm’s length before we trust it. Even our most attentive policies remain, almost always, ways of better managing a resource: sustainable yield, natural capital, renewable stocks. They refine the accounting; they do not escape it. The *ayllu* does not propose to manage the resource better—it refuses that the living be one. This is another root, not a gentler version of ours: one counts objects it wishes to spare, the other sees only beings that are not counted. *[Distinguer]* The refusal aligns with, without merging into, the Aymara [*suma qamaña*](https://viasophia.org/lexique/suma-qamana/)—whose horizon, Huanacuni says, is precisely that of the *ayllu*. But *suma qamaña* names the fullness of a well-adjusted life; *ayllu* names the social body that adjusts it, extended to all that exists. Two words, two planes: they are not conflated. What they share—refusing to treat the world as stock—comes after distinction, never before. What remains is what the word does to those who hear it. We have learned to ask how best to manage our resources; the *ayllu* returns a different question, older and clearer: of what am I a member, not an owner? Where nothing that lives is a resource, the human ceases to be the king who takes. He becomes once more a thread in a fabric he did not weave alone. --- **À lire aussi** - [Vivre bien n'est pas vivre mieux](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-06-17-suma-qamana-vivre-bien/) - [Ce qui circule et ce qui se paie](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-07-01-ce-qui-circule-ce-qui-se-paie/) - [La loi écrite dans la terre](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-06-16-la-loi-ecrite-dans-la-terre/) ## Sources - Fernando Huanacuni Mamani, *Buen Vivir / Vivir Bien. Filosofía, políticas, estrategias y experiencias regionales andinas* — Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indígenas (CAOI), Lima, 2010, trans. texte original espagnol ; rendu français maison Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/reenchanter/2026-07-02-la-ou-ressource-n-a-pas-de-place/