BSAS - Andrea Muehlebach: Do Waves have Rights?

Abstract

This paper asks the question of how the rights-of-nature movement challenges some of the basic precepts of liberal Western Law while at the same time also enshrining and reproducing it. It also asks how the frictions that emerge out of this contradiction are, in part at least, resolved by what some legal scholars prefer to call "Earth Law." Ranging from the granting of personhood to rivers, waves, and, most recently in Europe, the Spanish Mar Menor, I track the social effects, promises, and challenges of this global movement, as well as the work it performs as an act of utopic horizoning.

Bionote

Andrea Muehlebach is a Professor of Maritime Anthropology and Cultures of Water at the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research at the University of Bremen, Germany. She is the author, most recently, of "A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe" (Duke UP, 2023), an open access monograph: A Vital Frontier

The department seminar, known as Bergen Social Anthropology Seminars (BSAS), is the main forum for dialogue and debate about anthropological research and theoretical development at the Department in Bergen. All is welcome!