Akinananti
akinananti
The Shipibo-Konibo word that artist Chonon Bensho and her husband Pedro Favaron gloss as: the work done together, with love and joy, which seeks no selfish ends but the good of all. It’s not a method for producing better as a group—the love and joy (the affect) and the common good (the end) aren’t added to the task; they *are* the task. The word assumes a world made of subjects in relation—“no one is in solitude”—not a stock of inert objects to be extracted.
In the Shipibo language we use the word akinananti to describe work that is done together with love and joy, work that does not pursue selfish ends but seeks the benefit of all.
Akinananti captures in a single word what French scatters across several— “collaboration,” “mutual aid,” “volunteering”—without any fully expressing it. Chonon Bensho, a Shipibo-Konibo artist from Santa Clara de Yarinacocha, elaborates on it with her husband Pedro Favaron: the work done together, with love and joy, not for personal gain but for the good of all.
The word doesn’t describe an efficient organization of labor. It names a kind of work where affect—love, joy—and purpose—the common good—are constitutive: remove them, and it’s no longer akinananti. It assumes, first, a world where “all living beings come from a shared source and take part in an interwoven web of relationships.” There, work isn’t about extracting from inert things but thickening bonds between subjects.
Not to be confused with mutual aid in the biological sense (Kropotkin and his heirs), which justifies itself through survival, as a strategy adopted by the living. Akinananti relies neither on survival nor on efficiency; it presupposes a cosmos of persons and makes joy its form. Resemblance comes after difference. Better compared to kené and puhpowee: three words that each assume, in their own way, a living that acts—not matter to be endured.