ABSTRACT
Persons such as humans and corporations have the ability to seek redress before a court of law. The notion of legal personhood, however, seems to actualize the contested modern tension between nature and culture in most of current social and legal theory. More than discontinuous and self-contained beings, Amazonian forests embody sentient and mind-bearing relations involving humans and other-than-human beings such as plants, animals, and spirits. Can the forest speak law? Do forests endlessly require the mediation of human modes of legal representation? Overflowing the ontological stability of the person, forests teach a notion of legal agency beyond the human, the state, and the norm. In an attempt to overcome anthropocentric concepts of agency, Chapter 16 ethnographically engages with Amazonian legal cosmologies through forest minds and relations. It also highlights several questions other-than-human legalities entail in legal practice. A long road lies ahead before state law listens to indigenous and more-than-human legalities. Chapter 16 is an attempt to dwell with the law both as a particular kind of symbolic representation, that is, a changing set of positive norms and procedures, and as a non-symbolic form of representation conjuring other-than-human selves within the legal theory and practice.
