Non-human legal personhood and ontological autonomy

Abstract

The imposition of a predetermined general order interrupts authentic ways of life and governance and nullifies natural forms as it transforms them by the will of the market. This standardizing legacy is being questioned in such a way that here-now we are experiencing a sociopolitical conjuncture that notably brings notions from Latin American social movements to the legislative sphere. Cases
taken to courts in which non-humans are considered subjects with rights are a phenomenon which is gaining notoriety and
is part of this process. What happens is that this imposed notion of person has been shown to be displaced from the Latin
American context and needs. The possibility of non-human persons, especially natural non-human beings, such as rivers or
mountains, theoretically affects the great divider of the modern world, the nature-culture field. The person as the analytical
key of ethnographic studies of Amerindian peoples has indicated this category as a possible legal and ontological disruptive.
New legal provisions or new uses for traditional provisions set the tone for a series of debates about legal forms of existence.
More than mere cultural conflicts, these disputes show that colonization ushered in a long ontological war in which, among
other things, the existence and non-existence of legal entities is a matter of power. This article aims to put in perspective
the juridical personality of non-humans as perhaps a legal articulation between realities that serves to the horizontality in
the decision fields of Law. In yet another attempt to defend the richness of conceptions of nature, person and human being,
the challenge of the meaning of the person in the face of ontological multiplicity must be located in the decolonization of
thought, peoples and nature.