In this lecture I intend to discuss the so-called "rights of nature", a legal category that recognizes different categories of extra-human beings, especially rivers, as legal persons whose integrity must be respected. These entities are represented by a council of guardians, usually of mixed composition, with strong participation from local populations. The analysis will be based on the study of a specific case, that of the Laje River, the first to gain this status in the Brazilian Amazon, in 2023. This is one of the rivers that crosses the territory of the Wari' indigenous people, with whom I have been working for more than three decades. The proposed law, submitted to the municipality, was drawn up by a Wari' indigenous man who was elected as a councillor that same year. I'm particularly interested in the equivocal agreements that allow the two sides - the Indigenous and the non-indigenous legal representatives - to come to an agreement through partial connections, in which different ontologies find points of convergence in the face of practical situations (usually environmental degradation) recognized by all the agents involved. I intend to compare the Wari' case with other cases of the attribution of "rights to nature", especially those of Te Urewera and the Whanganui River, in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia, pioneers in these rights and built around "ecotheological" ideas that consider the existence of a single Nature, holder of intrinsic rights.  Another point to be analyzed is the particular form of indigenous political action, through which agents circulate through different conceptions of relations between humans and extra-humans, in the form of an alternation of perspectives, which refutes the idea of hybridity.

Short bio

Aparecida Vilaça is Professor at the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology/MuseuNacional/Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and a researcher for the National Science Research Council (CNPq). Since 1986 she works among the Wari’ Indians of South-Western Amazonia, Brazil. Her fieldwork has been financed by the Ford Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She was Professeur Invité at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1999, Directeur d’Études Invité at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in the same city in 2000, Visiting Professor at Stanford University (2020) and Simón Bolívar Professor at the University of Cambridge.