ABSTRACT
This contribution focuses on the predicaments faced by anthropologists and lawyers, working closely with Indigenous experts and activists, when they try to apply positivist legal frameworks to defend and advance Indigenous rights when the Indigenous movement in question is animated by a strong critique of the premises on which these frameworks are based. The particular ethnographic and political context is the Mapuche people's highly conflictual relations with the forest industry in southern Chile. It entails an enquiry into the Forest Stewardship Council's ‘certification’ of the forest industry, as well as a critical examination of the roles both the lawyer and the anthropologist played as advocates of the Mapuche position.
While acknowledging the centrality of legal rights regimes to the Mapuche struggle, the further goal of this chapter is to subject the authors’ ‘use and refuse’ legal strategy to critical scrutiny and identify its limitations. The authors ultimately settle on an approach that both ‘uses’ and ‘refuses’ legal resources, which they call an ‘amphibious’ middle ground between two perspectives – one emerging from critical Western legal/social science traditions, the other from Mapuche ways of knowing and being that refuse these traditions – keeping them in creative tension with one another.
