Pathways to Utopia explores how Brazil's Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST), against all odds, has endured for forty years as one of the world's largest social movements - while transforming the way we understand the temporality of activism. Taking his cue from MST members and their generational struggle for land and justice, anthropologist Alex Ungprateeb Flynn reveals how the movement's longevity stems not only from its strong organization and collective vision but also from the productive tensions between established utopian ideals and emerging counter-utopian practices. Perceived by some as a shortcoming, this friction has proven to be a generative force, sparking creative gestures that reimagine social relations and ensuring the MST's adaptability in an ever-changing political landscape. Flynn chronicles the everyday lives of families navigating an extraordinary political reality over a fifteen-year period. At the heart of Pathways to Utopia is the realization that activism is not a momentary act but an ongoing, relational practice-one where even the smallest community actions reverberate, reshaping the very structures through which people seek to change the world. Evocatively written and balancing careful ethnography with key theoretical interventions, the book illuminates the dreams and sacrifices that characterize a life lived as struggle. Unfolding across multiple points of time, Pathways to Utopia tells a story of hope and resilience - one that promises a lasting influence on our twenty-first-century political imagination.
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is Associate Professor of Art and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Acknowledgments Dramatis Personae Introduction Scene I - Promise Pausa 1. Landlessness Pausa 2. Willed Transformation 3. Productivity Scene II - Contradictions Pausa 4. Human Values 5. Time Pausa 6. Encampment Pausa 7. Institutionalization 8. Ruin Scene III - Expression, Creative Gesture 9. The Culture Sector 10. Mistica, Light on Your Feet 11. Occupy, Hold Firm Pausa Scene IV - Transformation 12. Remaking the Movement from Within Pausa 13. Community, Small Spaces 14. Victory, In a Heartbeat Conclusion Glossary Notes Bibliography Index
"Pathways to Utopia is an eloquently written account of the Landless Workers Movement (MST), a group who contest what it means to be landless within a utopian framework. Through sensitive ethnography and remarkable theoretical nous, Flynn foregrounds how social justice is a life-long commitment best viewed through the lens of endurance rather rupture and slowness over eventedness. A Bergsonian prism of 'duration' upends commonly held assumptions about activism as reducible to dramatic moments of schism, providing a truly unique contribution to both the study of time and social movements. Foregrounding aesthetic registers of protest facilitates a critique of umbilical thinking that is based on linear cause and effect; instead, the utopian future is a complex dance of ever-shifting horizons, continuously invigorated by spatial, temporal, and corporeal relations. The outcome is a durational activism that is counter-utopian, where transformation twists pasts, presents, and futures into a topological knot of perpetual becoming." - Daniel M. Knight, co-editor of Porous Becomings: Anthropological Engagements with Michel Serres "Beautifully written . . . Flynn's love for the people and the places and the cause shines through. His writing style and long-standing commitment together make this an extremely compelling read." - Wendy Wolford, author of This Land Is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil "Formally innovative, yet grounded in the lived experience of grassroots participants in one of the most important social movements in the hemisphere, this is a book we desperately need today. Flynn reveals the vital interplay of political organization with the dissident action of those who craft lives of meaningful struggle in land occupations." - Maple Razsa, author of Bastards of Utopia: Living Radical Politics after Socialism "Flynn's book has the rare quality of combining rigorous scholarship with literary writing to exquisitely analyze how the longest social movement has been imagining an alternative collective future for the past 40 years." - Eduardo Dullo, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
