Pathways to Utopia
Time and Transformation in the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil

By (author) Alex Ungprateeb Flynn

ISBN13: 9780253073754

Imprint: Indiana University Press

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Format: Paperback / softback

Published: 01/08/2025

Availability: Not yet available

Description
Through collective occupation and unrelenting work for social justice, more than 450,000 Brazilian families in the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) have gained the security of a place to call home. MST members have endured years of painfully slow progress since settling on lands deemed unproductive by the federal government, where they lobby for legal autonomy, usage rights to the lands they occupy, and educational access for their children. Pathways to Utopia focuses on the MST's extraordinarily long-term struggle for land, dignity, and acknowledgement of what it means to be sem terra (landless), revealing that, contrary to the political understandings that have underpinned previous calls for change, it is the individual that empowers the collective. Where earlier theorists have positioned activist and utopian politics as processes defined by rupture, points of crisis, and a linear progression through time, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn argues that the MST's 40-plus years of endurance directly arise from its members' less spectacular but ultimately more resilient duration activism and counter-utopian practices. Evocatively written and balancing careful ethnography with key theoretical interventions, Pathways to Utopia demonstrates how members of social movements can transform the world around them, and in doing so, demand transformation of the movements to which they belong.
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. Mística, 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
  • Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography
  • Revolutionary groups & movements
  • Professional & Vocational
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List Price: £32.00