ABSTRACT
Anthropological and sociological perspectives on legal pluralism in Latin America have focused principally on the legal norms, practices, and authorities of indigenous people, and latterly on the challenges of recognizing indigenous rights, jurisdictions, and ways of life within dominant legal orders. This chapter aims to encourage greater dialog between the regional literature on legal pluralism and analyzes of the role played by various non-state forms of law or para-legalities in securing order in contemporary Latin America. The first section signals the limited recognition legal pluralism and subaltern legalities that occurred with the constitutional transformations of the 1980s and 1990s and briefly reviews the Latin American literature on legal pluralism and its key conceptual debates. A second section addresses the dynamic interplay between law and illegality in the constitution of the region’s plural constellations of governance. The author suggests a heuristic distinction between different types of illegality, pointing to the conceptual and empirical issues these signal. A third section advances the concept of fragmented sovereignties as a means of reconceptualizing legal pluralities, situating the judicialization, and juridification of subaltern struggles within broader transformations in configurations of neoliberal rule. Criminalization and the suppression of subaltern claims for citizenship underline the gap between the promises of multicultural constitutionalism and the experiences of indigenous peoples across the region.
