Jenny García Rualesis an Ecuadorian doctoral candidate in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Philipps University of Marburg, an associate researcher at the fellow group “Environmental Rights in a Cultural Context” at the Max-Planck-Institute (MPI) for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), and a doctoral fellow of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
Jenny’s doctoral topic is situated in the fields of Environmental Anthropology, Anthropology of Nature, and Legal Anthropology. Her research shall contribute to the processes of pursuing an ecocentric legal system in the (Ecuadorian) Amazon and of recognizing the rights of natural entities. To this end, she explores the legal proposal of the Kichwa People of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon and their animist perceptions of the environment.
The Kichwa People of Sarayaku launched a declaration appealing to grant legal personhood to the Kawsak Sacha (Living Forest), located in their territory, in the Pastaza Province. This declaration implies the recognition of their material and spiritual relations with the Living Forest (and other beings of the animal, vegetable, mineral, cosmic and spiritual worlds that inhabit it) within state law as a new legal category of protected area, including principles of cosmic ecology like SumakAllpa (land without evil). Jenny’s research addresses the process of translating a human-forest-relationship (Sacha Runa) into a Western legal framework. Building upon an interdisciplinary dialogue between law and anthropology, her suggested methodology includes a legal scan of environmental legal guarantees in Ecuador and anthropological fieldwork consisting of three stages of collaborative multi-species ethnography.
For more information on Jenny and her research work visit:
https://www.eth.mpg.de/garciaruales
https://www.cluster-transformation.org/en/members/jenny-garcia-ruales-en