Living Forest Constitutionalism

Beschreibung

An ethnography of Indigenous jurisprudence in the Ecuadorian Amazon that rethinks constitutionalism through the Living Forest.
If Pacha Mama or Nature was already recognised as a subject of rights in Ecuador’s Constitution, why did the Kichwa People of Sarayaku declare their territory the Living Forest (Kawsak Sacha) in 2018 – ›a living and conscious being with rights of its own‹? Drawing on accompanied legal ethnography in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Jenny García Ruales traces this question through Indigenous jurisprudence and the more-than-human normativities of the Living Forest. She develops Living Forest Constitutionalism, a constitutional theory that reimagines the foundations of constitutionalism from the jurisprudence of the Living Forest. An essential resource for scholars and readers seeking to rethink where constitutions come from, who makes law, and what it means to defend life.

Autor*in

Jenny García Ruales
Jenny García Ruales (Dr.) grew up between the Ecuadorian Coast, the Andes, and the Amazon. She is a legal anthropologist whose research explores the intersections of rights of nature, their intercultural translation, constitutional anthropology, indigenous own law, more-than-human legal worlds, and cosmomaterialities, with a particular focus on Amazonia.

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Ecuadorian Amazon Law Living Forest Nature Ethnology

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»Constitution-making has always assumed a document, a drafter, and a state. Jenny García Ruales asks us to unlearn all three, inviting us to imagine something bolder: constitutions sung, woven, and danced into being. Living Forest Constitutionalism is a quiet insurrection against the assumptions that structure our field, namely that constitutions are written, that authorship is human, that sovereignty flows from the state. Through patient ethnography and fearless theory, this book offers not just a new case, but a new vocabulary for what constitutionalism can be.«
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»This exceptional book offers a significant contribution to the understanding of the connectedness of law and the natural world. Based on original ethnographic work in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Jenny García Ruales theorises a more-than-human constitutional polyphony composed of texts, songs, myths, material objects, activism, and traditions. The work contributes to but also extends and adds nuance to the global understanding of situated rights of nature, showing in extraordinary depth how multiple practices and discourses give rise to an emergent constitutional creativity in which the living forest itself is an active participant.«
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»Taking nature seriously as a subject of rights requires a different theory of law. All the more so when we are facing a climate emergency. We will not find it in traditional law, nor in the great jurists of the West. No. We find it in the Amazon rainforest. In this book, we walk hand in hand with the Sarayaku People to understand the constitutionalism of Kawsak Sacha. Through a constitutional ethnography, we listen to songs and drums, communicate with nature, and corazonamos. The beliefs and practices of the Sarayaku People are both hope and a path forward. This book opens doors for us and invites us to take the first steps. There is no time to lose. In your hands is one of the most important treatises on twenty-first-century constitutionalism. García Ruales and the Sarayaku People are to the Rights of Nature what Kelsen is to positive law.«
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