Conclusion

This book has clearly shown that legal pluralism does not mean the same thing to all people. For some people in urban Ecuador, legal pluralism is seen as a dichotomy between customary law and national law. In the daily reality in the parish of Zumbahua, however, there are a wide variety of interconnected conflicts, as well as a mixture of legal procedures carried out by several different authorities. This study has therefore made the case for a more empirical view of legal pluralism. The main argument of this book is that if we strive to understand what legal pluralism means in the daily reality of those who practice and are affected by it, we have to take such different views into consideration. To paraphrase Goodale (2009: 33), this study tries to bridge the empirical gap between persistent orthodox understandings of legal pluralism and the reality of everyday lived experience. Ecuador formally recognized its multicultural character in 1998, and as

part of that policy it recognized the use of customary law. Thus, a situation of de jure legal pluralism prevails in the nation. Because additional rules that would make customary law compatible with national law still had to be developed, this formal recognition led to legal uncertainty for indigenous people regarding how customary law could and should be used in cases involving internal conflicts. It is within this legal void that the de facto use of legal pluralism occurs. In several cases analyzed in this book, people’s perception and use of different legal systems reflect “interlegality,” a situation where there is a general perception that two different legal systems are mixed to such an extent that there they have resulted in the creation of a new system (de Sousa Santos 2002). This illustrates the fact that, on a local level, there sometimes doesn’t appear to have been a great deal of change in the actual use of the two systems since the promulgation of the 1998 Constitution (that is, given that there had been de facto recognition of customary law ever since the time of the Spanish Conquest). Other cases, however, show some changes in how the two systems are used. In Chapters 7 and 8 of this book, it was shown how, at both the local and national levels, indigenous authorities purposely test the boundaries of the jurisdiction that they were recently granted. The legal void thus provided them a space in which jurisdiction could be asserted. This in turn led the state to implement measures to reassert its own authority.