Extending law beyond the human, the book probes the conceptual openings, methodological challenges and ethical conundrums of law in a time of deep socio-ecological disturbances and transitions.
How do we learn and practice law across epistemic and ontological difference? What sort of methodologies do we need? In what sense does conjuring other-than-human beings as sentient, cognitive and social agents— rather than mere recipients of state-sanctioned rights—transform what we mean by “law” and “rights of nature”? Legal institutions exclusively focused on human perspectives seem insufficiently capable of addressing current socio-ecological challenges in Latin America and beyond. In response, this book strives to integrate other-than-human beings within legal thinking and decision-making protocols. Weaving together various fields of knowledge and world-making practices that include—but are not limited to—Indigenous legal traditions, Earth Law and multispecies ethnography, Law, Humans and Plants focuses on the entanglement of law, ecology and Indigenous cosmologies in Southern Colombia. In so doing, it articulates a general postanthropocentric legal theory which is proposed, a tool to address socioecological challenges such as climate change and bio-cultural loss.
This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the disciplines of environmental law, Earth Law and ecological law, legal theory and critical legal studies as well as others working in the in the fields of Indigenous studies, environmental humanities, legal anthropology and sustainability and climate change justice.
By:
Iván Darío Vargas Roncancio
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 653g
ISBN: 9781032393674
ISBN 10: 103239367X
Series: Law, Justice and Ecology
Pages: 252
Publication Date: 06 February 2024
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
List of tables ix Preface x Acknowledgments xii Introduction: law and the pluriverse 1 PART I Law and its ontological itineraries: a legal herbarium 29 1 Yoco (Paullinia Yoco): cooling down the mind and learning law where the law is not named as such 31 Intertext 1 The elder and the seed 62 2 Yagé (Banisteriopsis caapi): moving words across worlds and entangled temporalities in Amazonia 64 Intertext 2 Tobacco as people 82 3 Coca leaf (Erythroxylaceae coca): territories in motion and learning law with the Amazonian “mambe” 85 Intertext 3 On entanglements and encounters: an attempt at controlled speculation 109 4 The making of an ethnobotanical research agreement in Southern Colombia: Yagé, invisible people and the law of the place 114 PART II On the rights of nature: limits, possibilities and challenges in neo-extractivist worlds 143 5 Sowing concepts: towards a post-humanist understanding of the encounter of beings 145 6 Plants and the law: vegetal ontologies and the rights of nature 185 7 Conjuring sentient beings and relations in the law: rights of nature and a comparative praxis of legal cosmologies 199 8 Forest on trial: towards a relational theory of legal personhood 216 9 Concluding, opening 231 Index 248
Iván Darío Vargas Roncancio is Assistant Professor in the Law & Society Program, Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS) at York University.
