Original epistemologies of life and territory: great challenge for the Inter-American Court Of Human Rights

Abstract

The differences between the liberal western creed and that of the native peoples, about the notion of land, are part of the hegemonic differentiation of cultures. The way in which the original paradigms of existence (land-identity-life) are ignored, demands the counter-hegemonic use of law, this time from the original epistemologies that try to recover in the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Court IDH). However, will such a Court have until now integrated a holistic notion of access to land in its jurisprudence regarding the rights to property, to the collective personality, and to life understood as a physical and symbolic existence? The concept of essential unity, as a new category of analysis, could respond to questioning, facing the theoretical-normative challenge.