Indigenous Water Ontologies, Hydro-Development and the Human/More-Than-Human Right to Water: A Call for Critical Engagement with Plurilegal Water Realities
Department of Social Sciences, University Carlos III de Madrid, 28903 Madrid, Spain
Academic Editors: Bruce M. Wilson, Malcolm Langford and Rebecca Schiel
Water 2021, 13(12), 1660; https://doi.org/10.3390/w13121660
Received: 2 April 2021
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Revised: 1 June 2021
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Accepted: 3 June 2021
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Published: 14 June 2021
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Politics of the Human Right to Water)
Water conflicts across the world are bringing to the fore fundamental challenges to the anthropocentric boundaries of the human rights paradigm. Engaging with the multi-layered legal ethnographic setting of the Xalalá dam project in Maya Q’eqchi’ territory in Guatemala, I will critically and empirically unpack not only the anthropocentric boundaries of the hegemonic human rights paradigm, but also the ontological differences between indigenous and Euro-Western legal conceptualizations of human-water-life. I argue that it is necessary to pave the way for urgent rethinking of the human right to water and, more broadly, human rights beyond the modern divide of nature-culture. International law and human rights scholars should therefore not be afraid of plurilegal water realities and should start engaging with these ontologically different concepts and practices. Embarking on a bottom-up co-theorizing about human and beyond-the-human water rights will be imperative to avoid recolonization of indigenous knowledges-ontologies by non-indigenous scholarships and public policy.
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Keywords:
legal ethnography; more-than-human; rivers; Guatemala; indigenous Maya Q’eqchi’
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MDPI and ACS Style
Viaene, L. Indigenous Water Ontologies, Hydro-Development and the Human/More-Than-Human Right to Water: A Call for Critical Engagement with Plurilegal Water Realities. Water 2021, 13, 1660. https://doi.org/10.3390/w13121660
AMA Style
Viaene L. Indigenous Water Ontologies, Hydro-Development and the Human/More-Than-Human Right to Water: A Call for Critical Engagement with Plurilegal Water Realities. Water. 2021; 13(12):1660. https://doi.org/10.3390/w13121660
Chicago/Turabian StyleViaene, Lieselotte. 2021. "Indigenous Water Ontologies, Hydro-Development and the Human/More-Than-Human Right to Water: A Call for Critical Engagement with Plurilegal Water Realities" Water 13, no. 12: 1660. https://doi.org/10.3390/w13121660
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