The Juridification of Politics

Abstract

Abstract This chapter reviews the principle debates on the juridification of politics, discussing anthropological analysis of the juridification of Indigenous politics. While much of the broader debate refers principally to the diffusion and vernacularization of state and international law, and the subjectivities generated by engagements with dominant norms and institutions, here I turn the lens on the complex dialectics involved in Indigenous Peoples’ juridification of their own forms of law or what in Spanish is referred to as derecho propio. Drawing on my ethnographic work in Guatemala, I trace the different ways in which Mayan rights activists and their allies have analysed, systematized, and defended their own forms of law in the context of battles for state recognition of legal pluralism in the post-war period. I point to the potentialities inherent in the juridification and auto-juridification of Mayan law, arguing that different legal engagements can be read as exchanges that also contain and transmit a politics of what Audra Simpson (2015) has termed ‘indigenous refusal’. By articulating claims and narratives that assert the sovereignty of their specific time-space over territories, peoples, and practices in the past, present, and future, Indigenous Peoples reject the sovereign jurisdictional claims and specific temporalities and ontologies of state legality and international human rights law, envisioning alternative futures. I also reflect on the challenges for anthropologists involved in the juridification and auto-juridification of Indigenous law, advocating critical engagement that furthers an intercultural epistemological dialogue aimed at radically transforming racialized structures of dispossession.

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