For centuries now, the fastest way to be recognised as a thought leader on a topic is to publish a book about it. That’s not unreasonable, given how much time and thought it takes to write a book. But it does risk cutting important voices out of the debate.
Some people are too busy to write, which means we get more books of theory than books by practioners. Publishers are reluctant to take a chance on first time or one-off authors, so many people never get to see their ideas in print. Marginalised groups also tend to be excluded, and of course some people just don’t think in the traditional linear arguments that we associate with the book form.
Ailton Krenak falls into several of the categories above. He’s busy, far away, and thinks in poetic and provocative ways that aren’t easily pinned down, and yet this is the second book of his in two years. Like the last, Life is Not Useful, it has been derived from talks and interviews, “words captured in flight” as the editor Rita Carelli puts it in the afterword.
As an indigenous leader in Brazil, Ailton (Krenak is a tribal name rather than a surname) has a deeply sceptical view of capitalist progress and how it devalues the natural world and the ‘constellations’ of creatures that share it. Too often economic and urban planning work against the landscape, dominating it and subjugating it. Ailton consistently calls readers back to the relationships between things, the importance of land and nature, and the impossibility of setting humanity above it. Humans are not the only ones with agency and will. Others have it too – including things that aren’t even alive, such as rivers. “In narratives where only humans act, this centrality silences all other presences.”
Our political systems aren’t good at recognising this. The very word ‘politics’ comes from the Greek ‘polis’, meaning city. Likewise the root of the words citizens and citizenship betray their urban origins. What does it mean to extend citizenship into an indigenous context, well outside the city and its structures? This isn’t an abstract question, but one that countries like Brazil have wrestled with while drawing up their constitutions. Ailton uses the concept of Florestania as a way of imagining a wilder form of citizenship, a place of belonging that doesn’t depend on development and services.
Elsewhere he describes how Western thought focuses too much on the future and devalues the present. Or how it sees children as creatures that need to be shaped, rather than honouring who children are right now.
The essays here deal with education, democracy, and urbanism, and they’re full of counter-cultural perspectives. There isn’t really an agenda or manifesto here. There’s no to-do list for fixing the world, and you’ll need to look elsewhere if you’re after facts and figures. Ailton writes instead that he hopes his words can “oxygenate” the debate, and readers can make of it what they will.
- Ancestral Future is available from Earthbound Books
The Earthbound Report 
Several important ‘food for thought’ items here – many thanks for drawing this to our attention!