Decomposing the Law, Composting the Collectives: Indigenous Struggles for Lands and the Making of Life Beyond Rights

Abstract In the last two decades in Brazil, indigenous peoples have been struggling for their rights through the practice of what they call “retomada de terras” (reappropriation of lands), which consists of reoccupying ancestral lands that were invaded by farmers or other explorers. Inspired by indigenous perspectives, new social movements are struggling for land and territory. After years of reclaiming the legal demarcation of indigenous lands or agrarian reform without a resolution from the State, they decided to act directly in the building of their territories. Within this process, there is also a production of another space, another ecology, another relationship to the land. If Carl Schmitt is right when he says that the original movement that makes law arise is the taking of land, which produces an ordering of space and defines borders that establish internal and external relations, what happens when lands are retaken and borders are reshaped? If we conceive of law in a very modern and technical conception, solely linked to an institutional image, it cannot help us to answer this question. The practice of “retomada” by the Tupinambá people and the agroecological experience of the Web of the People ( Teia dos Povos ) in Brazil can be an interesting path to investigate how the conditions of existence can be produced beyond abstract rights and more-than-human arrangements can change the way we live together. These practices produce justice spatially in a given territory and bring conceptions of rights rooted in the entanglements of bodies and their territories.