Book Description

"Legal institutions exclusively focused on human perspectives seem insufficiently capable of addressing current socio-ecological challenges in the Andes-Amazon. It is critical to probe new analytical frameworks that integrate other-than-human beings within legal institutions and decision-making protocols. Such an approach weaves together various fields of knowledge and world-making practices that include Indigenous legal traditions, ecological law, multispecies ethnography, and ecological economics. I discuss how human and other-than-human beings such as medicinal plants and what Indigenous in Southwestern Colombia call the “invisible ones,” co-create legal protocols and institutions. It studies the conceptual openings, methodological challenges, and ethical conundrums of this approach for Earth Law, particularly the rights of nature. What happens when we consider forms of agency beyond symbolic and multicultural frameworks in legal theory and practice? How does a law that emerges from plant-human-invisible peoples' entanglements challenge concepts of justice, agency, and value in times of socio-ecological transitions? How do forests become legal agents through different sets of territorial practices? My dissertation combines a multi-sited ethnography, and post-humanist approaches in anthropology, law, and decision-making theory to study the entangled lives of law and ecology in Colombia, as well as the potential contributions of this framework towards a post-anthropocentric legal theory. In conversation with biologists, Indigenous practitioners from the Cofán and the Inga communities, legal scholars, and medicinal plants, particularly Paullinia yoco and Banisteriopsis caapi, Legal Lives looks at how legal institutions emerge from the fabric of human and other-than-human forms of agency. This relational approach is at the core of Earth Law and the radical paradigm shift it proposes for legal theory and practice in Latin America. The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first one (I. Law-Otherwise) ethnographically follows relationships between medicinal plants and legal protocols: chapter 1 includes three sub-chapters with the name of three different plants where I discuss the implications of vegetal agencies for socio-legal thought in the Andes-Amazon. Chapter 2 focuses on the making of an ethnobotanical research protocol with humans, plants, and what members of the Cofán community in the regions of Nariño and Putumayo refer to as the invisible people. Thus, part I provides an ethnographic and conceptual basis to support the theoretical claims of part II: The Rights of Nature: Limits and Possibilities. Part II addresses the conceptual limits and political possibilities of the Rights of Nature in the context of Earth Law. By attending to the social and legal worlds of other-than-human beings introduced in the first part, it re-imagines fundamental premises of social and legal sciences at present: the idea that the law is primarily symbolic or propositional (Ch. 3); the notion that rights and responsibilities are commensurable across different legal cultures and cosmologies, and that legal personhood is fundamental for legal redress (Ch.4). Part III (Rhizomatic Agencies) reviews and summarizes the argument concerning agency and discusses how parts I and II could serve as tools for legal transformation in concrete scenarios of learning and judicial decision-making. A summary of agency theory with ethnographic insights from the first section, Ch. 5 dives into the limits of individual and collective forms of agency and explores the possibility of plural and rhizomatic agencies that include other-than-human beings in decision-making. Ch. 6 can be considered as coursework material concerning Indigenous legalities. It refers to a specific Indigenous legal tradition—the Inga—as it transforms State law, while contributing with the Earth Law movement. The dissertation closes with a syllabus on “Indigenous legal traditions."--