Event overview
Law as regulation among worlds Plurinationalism and Pluriversal Justice - Goldsmiths Anthropology Seminar Series
If politics can be seen as ‘relations among worlds’, law can be analysed as regulation among worlds. In postcolonial states and societies, these worlds are multiple and multiplying; however they are not ontologically given in postcolonial states, but rather haphazardly co-constructed through the engagements and encounters that subjects in motion have with distinct legal regimes and normative orders; these can range from the bricoleur’s justice of the city block, to the justice system of the indigenous community with its explicit invocation of pre-colonial justice, to the modernist state project of judicial reform.
Bolivia, particularly the state-led project of decolonisation through law, provides a laboratory for postcolonial legal transformation and its attendant fabrication of diverse subjectivities. This paper analyses a series of encounters between human rights lawyers from a state funded legal orientation institution and indigenous communities during a campaign against all forms of violence. I argue that these encounters, and the workshops, demonstrations and rituals of which they consisted, produced distinct socio-legal worlds in order to attempt to weave them together. The ensuing legal harmonics depend on the infra-legal; rights are affirmed and discussed through dramaturgy; anti-violence campaigns are sustained in and through bodily movements, metaphors and gestures.
Ultimately, I argue that Bolivian Plurinationalism, in which the state seeks to gather up and elevate indigenous justice to the level of that of the state, without entirely specifying the conditions under which each form of justice should operate, generates ‘wordly’ subjects, whose movements within and between legal registers and normative orders both create and undermine the systems themselves. That is, each system (that of the originary indigenous peasant justice, state justice, and more local representations of justice) takes shape in intersubjective relation to the others, and depend on the circulation of bodies, documents, cases, ideas, plaintiffs and victims between them.
This seminar is part of the Goldsmiths Anthropology Seminar Series. The seminars are free and open to all, no booking required.
This seminar is in person only.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 2 Nov 2022 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
Accessibility
If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.
