Paper short abstract:

This paper thinks comparatively about two recent decisions to grant "legal personhood" to rivers in New Zealand and India. It suggests that this legal "livingness" serves to extend state control over natural resources while simultaneously rendering that control unstable, even ultimately impossible.

Paper long abstract:

In a series of remarkable decisions in New Zealand and India in March 2017, three rivers - the Whanganui, the Ganga, and the Yamuna -- were granted the legal status of persons. While such personhood might come as no surprise to post-humanists who have long taken seriously the agency of other-than-human worlds (Kirby 2017; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Povinelli 1995; Bennett 2010), the complicated politico-legal processes by which this "personhood" is being translated into legal idioms, however partially, unevenly, and at times problematically, remains under-explored (de la Cadena 2010; Blaser 2013; Li 2015). Drawing on recent ethnographic work in New Zealand and India, this paper explores how the multiple forms of personhood at stake in these decisions are being mobilized as part of broader social justice struggles. While government representatives, Indigenous leaders, and NGO activists in both countries have drawn on substantially different legal histories as well as conflicting understandings of what it might mean to recognise rivers as "living entities" with "metaphysical properties," both cases raise thorny questions about how other worlds and "practices of worlding" might fundamentally destabilise juridical spaces still colonised by British imperial logics (de Castro and Danowski 2017). By thinking comparatively about legal personhood for rivers across these two cases, my argument is that we are better able to engage enduring questions about the limitations of liberal rights frameworks while at the same time more carefully considering how the legal "livingness" of rivers might contribute to the ongoing decolonisation of Western legal systems.