**Author details**

*Quality of Life - Biopsychosocial Perspectives*

a stout refusal to be eaten…" ([34], pp. 163, 164).

the result of interactions of common goods and values.

constant transformation.

**Acknowledgements**

and given rise to original forms of activism and discourse. In order words, the common is far from a purely conceptual invention: the common is rather the concrete product of social movements and various schools of thought dedicated to opposing the dominant tendency of our era, namely the extension of private appropriation into every sphere of our societies, out cultures and out very lives." ([33], p. 21).

This ontological view of the world based on sharing inalienable common goods (alienable goods would have been inconceivable) prevailed for thousands of years until the arrival of capitalism—along with private accumulation—as a mode of production and construction of social life and culture took hold of the modernization processes of the Modern Age and buried the ancient traditions of ecological life still present in indigenous communities and local coexistence practices beneath a culture of trade. Defending local identity is not easy. Amid the globalizing trends in motion today, it means going against the flow, as argued by studies by noted thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman and Edgar Morin: "With globalization, identity becomes a heated matter. All the landmarks are canceled, biographies become jigsaw puzzles whose solutions are difficult and mutable. However, the problem is not the single pieces of this mosaic, but the way they fit in with each other." ([34], p. 104) "Identity, let us be clear about it, is a 'hotly contested concept.' Whenever you hear that word, you can be sure that there is a battle going on. A battlefield is identity's natural home. Identity comes to life only in the tumult of battle; it falls asleep and silent the moment the noise of the battle dies down. Cutting both ways cannot therefore be avoided. It can perhaps be wished away (and commonly is, by philosophers striving for logical elegance), but it cannot be thought away, and even less can it be done away with in human practice. 'Identity' is a simultaneous struggle against dissolution and fragmentation; an intention to devour and at the same time

Globalization tends to "devour" the local and disintegrate and fragment what remains of community life and culture to subject it to standardizing "technoeconomic" logics, as analyzed by Morin [35]. Nonetheless, the local does not disappear. It moves and endures in the appreciation of the commons, which unites, creates, and gives a sense and feelings of belongingness to a living human community in

The Latin American scientific community can make a significant contribution to the addition of value to the productive, social, and ecological life of the region [14]. Added value is urgently needed to overcome the region's considerable delay and advance toward sustainable development and improve the quality of life of its population. Creative capacities exist in all countries and areas. The defense of water—a vital resource—for instance, and natural resources in general in times of fierce global competition and irreversible climate change, is the only way to guarantee the construction of a truly sustainable ecosocial order. To this end, we must think less linearly and more circularly in order to sync the movement of the planet's ecosystem components with the complex movements of human life in the biosphere. In truth, everything is a common good, as even that which is paradoxically called "private" is

I especially appreciate the financial support you have provided me, and that made possible the elaboration, translation, and editing of this chapter, to the Water Research Center for Agriculture and Mining (CRHIAM), Conicyt/ Fondap/15130015 of the Universidad de Concepción, Chile, and Interdisciplinary

Research Center of Excellence (www.crhiam.cl. +5641 2661758).

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Jorge Rojas Hernández1,2\* and Javier Lastra Bravo3

1 Department of Sociology, School of Social Sciences. Universidad de Concepcion, Chile

2 Water Research Center for Agriculture and Mining (CRHIAM), Universidad de Concepcion, Chile

3 Intitute of Sociology, School of Philosophy, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany

\*Address all correspondence to: jrojas@udec.cl

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
