Paper short abstract:

This paper suggests a collaborative ethnography -involving human and non-human agency- to capture the ontological occupation of the Kawsak Sacha (living forest). A methodological approach able to acknowledge multiple ontologies as a possibility to exist and be politically recognized is essential in environmental debates.

Paper long abstract:

Starting with the reflection that relationality between multispecies is always situated in a specific environmental and social context, this paper makes a call to reinvent methodologies able to comprehend juridical devices proposed in the Amazon -with specific ecological criteria- arise from environmental concerns. Although since 2008 the Rights of Nature have been acknowledged in the Ecuadorian Constitution, the Kichwa community of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon launched a declaration appealing to grant legal personhood to the Kawsak Sacha (living forest) and the beings belonging to the animal, vegetable, mineral, spiritual and cosmic world as a new legal category of protected area within state law. This recognition includes cosmic-ecological principles of the community such as Sumak Allpa, to be converted into legal concepts. I suggest a collaborative ethnography consisting of three stages involving human and non-human agency: a social (ontological) cartography, an exploration of a specific genre of material culture – in this case, the elaboration of pottery and a feminist approach –my body as my first territory. I intend to capture the ontological occupation of the Kawsak Sacha while understanding other communication forms with non-human beings, the different worldings (Blaser, 2013) within and answer why they should be protected. This means as well to deal with other-ways-of-knowing (de Sousa Santos, 2018) and the pluriverses (Escobar, 2014) of a community, which is a necessary step to understand elements that are invisible and unimaginable to the “outside world”, without being essentialized and romanticized, but conceived as a legal question that must be respected.