Minga and volunteering: Alternative economy and precarious work in pro-sustainability settlements in Chile

Abstract

Starting from the practices of the minga and volunteering, this work describes and reflects on the tensions and hybridizations that occur in the attempt to specify forms of alternative economy in a context of neoliberal capitalism. For this end, an ethnography was carried out in ecovillages, ecological communities and other forms of pro-sustainability settlements (ApS) in Chile, which allowed the identification of a series of collective economic practices. The mixtures that are produced in their economic heterogeneity are discussed and it is concluded that the ways in which the inhabitants of the ApS generate economic resources produces an economy that oscillates between forms of precarious work and economic relationships that contain an ethic of reciprocity.