LawasMagic. Some Thoughts on Ghosts, Non-Humans, and Shamans

Author:

Alvarez-Nakagawa Alexis

Abstract

Legal metamorphoses between persons/things have been recurrent in history: Persons can become things, animals can turn into persons, and even ghosts can obtain personhood in the legal domain. Law would work then as a form of magic, a powerful instrument to create realities that, although fictional, have very real effects. Drawing on anthropology and legal scholarship, I will show the links between law and magic. In this endeavor, I examine two groups of legal cases from Argentina where people and animals respectively obtained personhood through the magic of law. First, I analyze the so-called human rights trials that are judging the crimes of the last military dictatorship (1976–1983), and I argue that these are working to restore the legal personhood of those who enforcedly disappeared. Second, I examine a series of judgments that have recently ruled—for the first time in modern legal history—that orangutans, chimps, and elephants are “nonhuman persons.” I conclude this Paper by contrasting legal magic with shamanic practices. I argue that even if these two are linked, it is possible to find in some forms of shamanism a different way of framing the relationship between persons/things that can offer an alternative (to) law.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

Law

Reference70 articles.

1. See Mauss, supra note 19.

2. According to Viveiros de Castro, this cosmology was shared by Amerindian societies from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego; and puts upside down the Western distinction between subject and object, soul-body, form-substance, or culture-nature. See Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, La Mirada Del Jaguar 270 (L. Tennina trans., 2013).

3. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History, in 2 Structural Anthropology 329 (M. Layton trans. 1978); Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques 76 (J. Weightman & D. Weightman trans., 1992).

4. In a similar vein, Taussig has noted that mimesis has a complex relation with alterity: The former can close the doors to the latter—like in law's case—or can be a passage to other forms of being—like in shamanism. After all, mimesis is always a mean to relate to otherness. In Taussig's terms, we can think in “mimesis as an art of becoming something else, of becoming other.” See Taussig supra note 16, at 36.

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