Law, Humans and Plants in the Andes-Amazon

The Lawness of Life
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-39369-8
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 268 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 381 g

Reihe: Law, Justice and Ecology

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.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Vargas Roncancio, Iván Darío

Fachgebiete

• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften, Biologie: Sachbuch, Naturführer
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften Ökologie
• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Geographie: Sachbuch, Reise
• Rechtswissenschaften Öffentliches Recht Umweltrecht Umweltrecht allg., Technikrecht, Immissionsschutzrecht

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

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.