An anthropological gaze helps put to debate that the social and solidarity-based economy is but a piece of a wider web of cultural practice and meaning. That is: economy is a social practice. The "otra economía" is a practice with specific characteristics.As a result of ethnographic analyses three specific characteristics have been identified as otra economía, otra sociedad underlying orientation:1) Critical and collective decision making power and processes. See De Pueblos y Fronteras, Vol. 8 Nº 16 for an analysis of such processes in Latin America.2) Egalitarian and emancipatory social, political and economic relations based on direct participatory strategies. For anthropological analysis situated in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, mostly, see Reunión de Antropología Mercosur ?Situate, enact and imagine South Cone Anthropologies. Work Group 74: Collective political practices.?3) An awareness of the need to take care, fairly share and distribute natural resources. See La Vía Campesina for their latest international declaration, and see also the work of Domínguez in Argentina and in Chaco specifically.