Beyond legal facts and discourses: towards a social-ecological production of the legal

This chapter provides new insights into the legal pluralist literature to account for situation in which the production of the legal stems from social-ecological encounters. Existing legal pluralism scholarship can be broadly divided into two streams: one, originating in classic anthropological studies and the other rooted in autopoietic theory. Despite marked differences between the two strands, they both locate law exclusively in the social domain, whether speaking of social facts/phenomena or as, in the autopoietic case, discourses. However, relegating law to the realm of the social cuts off situations in which the law is given meaning by dynamic engagements between society and nature, situations in which what counts as law is not merely a social production but it is a complex process involving the practices and bodies of human and non-human entities. Inspired by law and geography attempts at re-materialising the legal, this chapter argues for a ‘re-materialisation’ or ‘re-embodiment’ of legal pluralism and concretises the theoretical discussion with two empirical examples.