Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This research article presents some of my findings regarding some of the bodies of water in the Bolivarian Mojana region of Colombia, which I was able to discover during my ethnographic fieldwork, thanks to the expert local knowledge of the region’s traditional fishermen, who introduced me to them. In my dual capacity as a lawyer advising some of these fishermen and as an anthropologist, I identified connectivity and movement as characteristics of the swamps and rivers studied. I was also able to view them as besieged bodies whose lives are in jeopardy, as I describe in relation to the transformations brought about by water infrastructure and illegal land grabbing. I bring the two aforementioned characteristics to the field of studies on law for the Anthropocene, to investigate the question: What do bodies of water have to teach the law? And in dialogue with authors such as Grear (2020), Davies (2022), Wheeler, Grear, and Burdon (2023), who have considered that the environmental and social context in which we find ourselves merits the emergence of a post-humanist and post-anthropocentric Wild Law (in which matter is neither immutable nor passive, nor can it be considered fixed or localized), I propose that a conceptual shift involves considering that the principles of law arise from non-humans and more-than-humans to regulate the human world, and not the other way around. With this research, we are invited to consider what a wild law for the Anthropocene would be based on bodies of water and what a justice of that nature would entail.
Source: Universitas Humanística
Author: Helena Catalina Rivera Cediel
Institution: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
Language: English
Topic: Environmental law and policy
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7167499151