Premium
Adjudicating Indigeneity: Anthropological Testimony in the Inter‐American Court of Human Rights
Author(s) -
Loperena Christopher A.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1111/aman.13415
Subject(s) - complicity , indigenous , human rights , ethnography , ethnic group , state (computer science) , sociology , witness , law , politics , political science , anthropology , criminology , ecology , biology , algorithm , computer science
In 2014, the Inter‐American Court of Human Rights heard two cases concerning the alleged complicity of Honduran state institutions in the violation of Garifuna communal property rights. Garifuna, a people of mixed Arawak, Carib, and African descent, are one of nine officially recognized “ethnic groups” in Honduras. Yet the state has repeatedly denied their status as a pueblo originario —a people native to Honduras—thus calling into question the lawfulness of their claims to national territory. I draw on my experience serving as an expert witness to analyze the role of cultural evidence in the legitimization of Garifuna rights claims, and how specifically ethnographic treatments of Indigenous cultural practices are circumscribed within dominant juridical interpretive frameworks and modes of recognition. The judgment, issued in October 2015, repeatedly deployed anthropological concepts and insights to bind Indigenous subjectivity to the land, thereby deepening essentialized notions of Garifuna ethnic and racial difference. This article probes the challenges of presenting cultural evidence in a court of law and the limited political potential of witnessing, which, I argue, stem from the ways in which anthropological and legal ways of knowing coarticulate.