---
title: "Akinananti"
sousTitre: "Chonon Bensho, a Shipibo-Konibo artist, and Pedro Favaron name a labor whose form is love and joy, and whose end is the good of all—not efficiency."
description: "Akinananti, a Shipibo-Konibo word: work done together, with love and joy, without selfish ends. A voice from within, distinct from 'teamwork.'"
date: 2026-06-08
lang: en
tradition: shipibo
auteurs: ["Chonon Bensho", "Pedro Favaron"]
---
# Akinananti

CChonon Bensho begins by signing her name. On the civil registry of Yarinacocha,
she was recorded as Astrith Gonzales; in her mother tongue, Shipibo-Konibo,
she is Chonon Bensho—"the swallow of the healing orchards," heir to her
grandmothers' knowledge. She writes with her husband, Pedro Favaron, born in
Lima, now a member of her family **by kinship**: no longer a *nawa*, a
stranger, as the Shipibo say, but a link in a web of relations. It is from
here—a word spoken by two, from within a kinship, offered outward—that this
term reaches us.

  
    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.
  
  In the Shipibo language, we use the word *akinananti* for work done together, with love and joy—a work that seeks no selfish ends but the good of all.

French has no single word for this. It has "collaboration," "teamwork,"
"mutual aid," "volunteering"—each capturing only a fragment. *Akinananti*
does not describe a method for producing more efficiently together: it names
a labor whose **affect** (love, joy) and **end** (the good of all) are not
moral extras tacked onto the task, but what constitutes it. Remove joy,
remove the common good it aims for, and it is no longer *akinananti*—it is
something else.

*[akinananti]* A Shipibo-Konibo word, given and glossed by the authors themselves. The only reliable source for the spelling of an Indigenous word is the one who bears it: here, Chonon Bensho, a speaker. We receive it; we do not reconstruct it.

Why should labor be, first and foremost, a matter of relation? Because in
this worldview, the world is not made of things. Bensho and Favaron state it
plainly:

> All living beings come from a common source and participate in an
> entangled web of relations. No one is alone. Rather, we are all in
> relation, in connection.
>
> — **Chonon Bensho & Pedro Favaron**, *Ainbon Jakon Joi: The Good Word of an Indigenous Woman*. éd. after the English version (trans. from Spanish by Tirso Gonzales), Terralingua, Langscape Magazine, vol. 9 (2020).

If every being—the plant, the river creature, the one that flies—possesses,
in their view, intelligence, language, and a spiritual share, then to work
is never to draw from a stock of inert objects. It is to act *within* a
fabric of relations already there. *Akinananti* is the name labor takes when
the world is peopled with subjects, not resources: one does not join in to
extract more, but to thicken the bond. This is what they oppose, without
detour, to "the competitive selfishness and cruelty that mercantilism has
thrust upon us."

We must beware of a false pairing here. The biology of mutual aid—Kropotkin
yesterday, his heirs today—shows that cooperation is a strategy of the
living, retained because it *ensures survival*. It is a fact of nature,
measured, mobilizable. *Akinananti* is not justified in this way: it rests
neither on survival nor on efficiency, but **presupposes** a cosmos of
persons and makes joy its form. Mutual aid is a fortunate calculation;
*akinananti* is a way of dwelling in relation. Both reject the solitary,
rivalrous individual—but the resemblance comes after the difference, never
before. One answers the question *how to endure*; the other, *how to live
well among the living*.

What remains is to hear the precision: this is not "the Shipibo think that."
These are two named individuals—a Shipibo-Konibo woman, a man who has entered
her family—who share, freely, a word from their language and the thought that
holds it. The word now lives in the [dictionary](https://viasophia.org/lexique/akinananti/). It
does not ask us to work more together. It asks what our labor would become if
the world around it were full of subjects rather than things.

## Sources

- Chonon Bensho & Pedro Favaron, *Ainbon Jakon Joi: The Good Word of an Indigenous Woman* — Terralingua, Langscape Magazine, vol. 9 (2020) — texte anglais trad. de l'espagnol par Tirso Gonzales (https://terralingua.org/stories/ainbon-jakon-joi-the-good-word-of-an-indigenous-woman/)


Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/reenchanter/2026-06-08-akinananti/