The Ordinary Envy of Aguabuena People: Revisiting Universalistic Ideas from Local Entanglements DANIELA CASTELLANOS Departamento de Estudios Sociales Universidad Icesi Cali, Colombia SUMMARY Envy encompasses various forms of relatedness among Aguabuena people, a small potter community of rural Andean Colombia. Drawing from ethno- graphic material, this article explores how envy is reciprocated in three concrete sce- narios (kinship, legal sues, and hydraulics), arguing for an understanding centered in envy’s ordinariness and daily practices as an analytical context from where to revisit more universalistic ideas. [envy, entanglements, Aguabuena/Colombia, context] Envidia was one of the first and most common words I heard throughout my stay among Aguabuena people. 1 Used as a noun stating an ontological status no one questioned (“la envidia aquí es el pan de cada día,” envy here is the daily bread); as an adjective of the people, the place, divinities or objects (“la gente de Aguabuena es la más envidiosa de todas,” Aguabuena people are the most envious of all); or as a verb performed by others and by those enunciating a fact (“ellos envidean,” they envy, “yo envidio,” I envy), envy was a feature that everyone in (and outside of) Aguabuena agreed most identified and distin- guished them from other people living nearby in the village of Ráquira in the ColombianAndes. Contrary to my expectations, it did not always mean some- thing bad or of which to be ashamed. Neither was it a concept that needed to be explicitly accounted for, in the sense that people would search for explanations. Instead, it was a shared fact that eagerly engaged them in correlating daily practices with (envious) performances. How can envious people like this live together? How is it that envy might not always stand for something deplorable? Moreover, why are envy’s sources not a matter of concern? If we look back at the way envy has been understood in anthropology and related disciplines, the threatening and corrosive part has been the one most emphasized together with envy’s causes. Envy troubles and undermines communal life (cf. Foster 1972a; Schoeck 1970; Smith 2008) and is rarely recognized to promote the creation and maintenance of social bonds as seemed to be the case among Aguabuena people. 2 Could it be that what Aguabuena people understand as envy is not the same destructive emotion of which we usually think? Or could envy work as a polyvalent expression (some- thing like a wild-card word) covering a different range of good and bad moral qualities? 3 From the literature, envy corresponds mainly to a state of exception that needs to be normalized through fear of witchcraft, illness, or the evil eye (Foster Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 40, Issue 1, pp 20–34, ISSN 1559-9167, online ISSN 1548-1409. © 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/anhu.12066.