Institut für Ethnologie
24.06.25: Vortrag im Ethnologischen Kolloquium von Andrea Muehlebach
19. Juni 2025, von Christina Fastner
Andrea Muehlebach (Universität Bremen) zum Thema:
Do Waves have Rights? On Justice beyond the Human
In 2023, the municipal council of Linhares, a coastal city in southeastern Brazil's Espirito Santo State, afforded special protection to the waves of the Doce River Mouth by granting them legal personhood. The recognition of the rights of waves to break perfectly at the mouth of the Doce River was a move embedded within a larger growing movement for the rights of nature and, ultimately, Earth Law. This talk investigates the many challenges this emergent legal movement raises, including who speaks for waves and what kinds of politics emerge out of the rise of this new kind of "personhood." I ask: What a wave is and what needs to happen for it to be conceptualized as a discrete “legal person” represented or spoken for in court. Second, I ask what liberal law is becoming if it is granting legal personhood to entities like waves or rivers, both of which integral parts of the elemental churn of nature. If waves are a set of complex relations and if the rights of nature movement is one of the fastest growing legal development of the contemporary moment, how will liberal lawmaking balance discrete “personhood” and elemental relationality? What must liberal law become to accommodate the wave?
© Andrea Muehlebach
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Das Kolloquium findet immer dienstags im großen Seminarraum des Instituts statt:
Institut für Ethnologie
Seminarraum 222, 2. OG
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, Westflügel
20146 Hamburg