Short Abstract

What happens to ethnographic research when law not merely regulates the research field, but actively constitutes its subjects, objects, and relations? This panel asks how shifting and overlapping legal orders reshape ethnographic research design, methods, fieldwork, and ethics across Latin America.

Long Abstract

Across Latin America, the growing entanglement of local, national, and transnational legal orders is transforming the conditions of ethnographic research. In fields where Indigenous cultural property, traditional knowledge, as well as tangible and intangible forms of cultural heritage are being re-configured, law not merely regulates existing social relations, but actively creates subjects, objects, and relations. At the same time, alongside Indigenous communities and other collective legal subjects, ecological entities—including rivers, forests, ecosystems and territories—are increasingly recognized as new legal subjects, challenging established notions of belonging, personhood, property, responsibility, and agency.

This panel asks how these transformations are reflected in research design and ethnographic methodology. What does it mean to design a research project when legal categories, rather than merely serving as an external normative framework, actively constitute subjects, objects, and relationships? How can ethnographers trace these processes of legal subject formation methodologically across overlapping—and sometimes even competing—jurisdictions and epistemic orders? What ethical challenges do these shifting legal configurations pose for ethnographers?

Drawing on approaches from legal pluralism, legal anthropology, and decolonial methodologies, the panel focuses on key moments in which encounters with volatile legal frameworks prompted researchers to rethink their research design, questions, fieldwork relations, and methods. We invite reflections on such encounters as instances of methodological intervention that scrutinize how law moves ethnographic research.

The panel thus approaches law as an ethnographic practice: a dynamic infrastructure that actively co-constitutes and contests research fields, epistemic orders, and relationships between human and more-than-human subjects.