The dispute for other legal knowledges in the judicial field: Indigenous territorial ontologies and mining extractivism in Guerrero, Mexico

Abstract

The Mè’phàà people in Guerrero, Mexico, won a judgment against open-pit mining by which they asserted their sacred and integral conceptions of territory as part of their collective rights. Through the sentence, they avoided the dispossession of their lands and life project. This article analyzes how discourses around indigenous territorial ontologies were brought into play through anthropological expert reports. We are interested in highlighting the challenges and limits of judicial knowledge when disputing different rationalities and epistemologies regarding territory, grievances, and rights within the legal space. We document the production of non-Western legal knowledge in the judicial field, revealing indigenous territory visions that confront the extractive projects. We focus our ethnographic gaze on the cultural and legal translation of the knowledge of the Mè’phàà people to analyze the scope and limits of a dialogue of knowledges and its effects on the judicialization and the politicization of the indigenous struggle.