As the final stage of several publications and presentations (Salamanca 2017, 2016), in this presentation, I delve into my most recent experience as an anthropologist in a legal case (Civil and Commercial Court Nº 2, 2016) that involves the territorial rights of the indigenous Qom inhabitants of a peri-urban neighborhood in the city of Formosa, in the Argentinean Chaco region and, by extension, to similar neighborhoods of Argentina and Latin America.
This experience allowed me to resort to the concept “Spatial Justice” as we have already proposed (Salamanca and Astudillo Pizarro, 2018) to present it in two ways. First, as a category capable of describing this Indigenous People’s historical systemic and structural situation of oppression (Young 1991), recently exacerbated as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, as a category capable of representing an anthropological-legal argument that—although resulting in the nationally and internationally recognized rights of Indigenous Peoples—can expand the repertoires of what is legally declarable as a horizon of legitimacy.
I also show that this category allows us to avoid the fourfold trap —social, cultural, historical, spatial— of neoliberal multiculturalism that imagines Indigenous Peoples as a cohesive, homogeneous, and static unit, located exclusively in remote and barely colonized areas. Finally, I present the participatory tools from the fields of anthropology and geography—testimonies, cartographies, kinship charts—through which I propose an alternative based on a situated empirical analysis. I attempt to show that their rights are stemmed from the repertoires of use, relationship, and socio-territorial memory that constitute their existence as a group; therefore, they are fundamental for their existence as such. I conclude by referring to the methodological responses drew to face the challenges imposed by the isolation measures taken as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mots clés : Spatial Justice |Neoliberal multiculturalism |Urban Indigenous Peoples |judicial expertise |Latin America
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