Akinananti
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.
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.
English (published text) 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.
English 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.
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.
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. 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 cited
- Chonon Bensho & Pedro Favaron, Ainbon Jakon Joi: The Good Word of an Indigenous Woman, ed. Terralingua, Langscape Magazine, vol. 9 (2020) — texte anglais trad. de l'espagnol par Tirso Gonzales.