2 Embodied relationality and rituals of interdependence

Standing barefoot on the riverbank of the Ariguani River, which flows in front of the entrance to the Botanical Garden of Busintana, an estate of fifteen hectares belonging to the Arhuaco-Ikᵾ Colombian Indigenous Peoples and serving as an ecological school of awareness, knowledge and traditions, Judge Belkis Izquierdo and the RIVERS film crew pledged, at the request of Mamo (spiritual leader) Menjabin, to leave behind our fears and disappointments before entering the Arhuaco-Ikᵾ Territory. The Botanical Garden of Busintana in Pueblo Bello, situated at the foot of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, was the first stop of our four-day film shoot in June 2023. There were eight of us involved: Belkis, her two daughters, the film crew and myself. Upon arriving and dropping our bags and technical equipment inside the botanical garden, Mamo Menjabin requested that we not start shooting yet. The Mamo emphasised the importance of formally introducing ourselves to the community and asking for permission to film, not only from them but also from the land. We began our process with a collective ritual aimed at obtaining permission from the land and its spiritual guardians, the Mamos. This ritual emphasised the interconnectedness of land, people and spirituality in Arhuaco-Ikᵾ ontology. Judge Belkis and I, as the documentary leaders, first needed to share our intentions out loud regarding the film shoot with both the community and the land.

Film shooting Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia @Dwiawin Maku Zalabata/ERC RIVERS, 2023.

At the riverbank, the Mamo reminded us to approach this TerritoryFootnote ² with good thoughts and positive intentions, as it is considered a living being. He distributed small cotton balls, instructing us to hold one in each hand. While gently spinning the cotton between our fingers, we were to mentally place our fears and negative experiences into the cotton, symbolically rolling them away. The Mamo then guided us to offer these cotton balls to the river, allowing the current, to carry our negative thoughts away. To conclude the collective ritual, I was asked to sprinkle water from the river on everyone’s hands as we passed through the entrance gate of Busintana, serving as a cleansing act before entering the sacred Territory. With this ritual complete, our four-day film shoot could finally begin, focusing on Judge Belkis’s encounters with various Mamos who had supported her legal work in recognising the Territory and its diverse life systems as victims of the Colombian armed conflict.

This ritual transported me back to 2002, when I was an anthropology student in the Q’eqchi community of Chicoj Raxquix, located a twenty-minute drive from Cobán, the municipal capital of Alta Verapaz, Guatemala. The village consisted of forty internally displaced families who were victims of genocide and had organised themselves with the help of the Catholic Church. I was invited to participate in a wa’tesinq, a ceremony to inaugurate the installation of thirty power poles that would bring electricity to the village for the first time. Wa’tesinq literally means ‘to give food’, and its purpose was to nourish the Tzuultaq’a – Mountain-Valley – and seek its protection and permission to utilise the energy poles that would bring prosperity to Chicoj Raxquix. While observing the sunset behind the mountains, an old Q’eqchi’ woman, a survivor of genocide, remarked, ‘The Tzuultaq’a is God because yoyo, it is alive.’ At the time, I thought I was being introduced to yet another belief – just one more myth among the many held by Mesoamerican Indigenous peoples.

Wa’tesinq ritual in Chicoj Raxquix, Alta Verpaz Department, Guatemala @LViaene, 2002.

During this ceremony, the community elders beheaded some roosters to collect their blood, which, along with the meat mixed with cocoa, was used to draw crosses on ceremonial offerings. A ceremonial guacal circulated with boj, a traditional fermented drink made from sugar cane and corn, and copal pom – a sacred resin – was lit to fill the air with its aroma. I remember feeling everything was very strange, I was in a distant and radically different world. Once we finished the first part of the ritual, we headed for the poles in the dark. The drums, flutes and violins accompanied the prayers of the spiritual guide and the elders, acting as a compass for the children, women and men. A cock was buried next to each pole, and a huge bonfire was lit as the elders prepared to play ceremonial tunes around it in a fire-sacrifice ritual called mayejak.

As dawn broke without my realising it, a mountain of fresh food awaited us to compensate for the late-night festivities. We shared a tasty kaq’ik (chicken soup), corn tortillas and beans. I remember it being one of the most delicious breakfasts I had after a night without sleep. Manuel, the aj ilionel (spiritual guide and healer), assured me that everything had gone very well that night. The Tzuultaq’a had given permission for those forty families to have electricity in their homes. The Q’eqchi’ of Chicoj Raxquix expressed gratitude to their living mountains for allowing this strange element into their lives, the poles held life-energy, their xmuhel, because they came from the Tzuultaq’a and were integrated into the landscape.

‘That’s the way it should be’, Manuel said, his bright eyes reflecting a profound understanding. For him, without this ritual, the Tzuultaq’a and the energy poles would not be harmonious, they would be angry and frighten the families. I will never forget the joy I felt in those people that morning – in that moment, an electrifying energy enveloped the community. I had successfully completed my first wa’tesinq.

A few years later, in 2006, I began a four-year research project on the role of cultural contexts in transitional justice processes, focusing on Guatemala. This journey ultimately led to my PhD in law, which I defended in early 2011 (Viaene, Reference Viaene2011) . I aimed to understand how the Maya Q’eqchi’ of Guatemala – as both victims and former civil self-defense patrollers – perceived the central concepts of this emerging field connected to human rights: justice, reparation, reconciliation and historical memory. I learned Maya Q’eqchi’ and conducted ethnolinguistic research regarding their own concepts and practices. I never managed to speak it fluently, but I reached a level sufficient to conduct interviews and focus groups together with Marta, my interpreter. I participated for two years in many wa’tesinq and mayejak. Some were held in small family circles, others among entire communities. Slowly, I started grasping that the Tzuultaq’a is much more than the myth I initially presumed; it symbolises a worlding that literally means Mountain-Valley. This understanding frames the ontological practices of Maya Indigenous peoples within what Euro-Western onto-epistemologies often label as the environment or nature (Viaene Reference Viaene2010; Viaene Reference Viaene2019; Viaene Reference Viaene2021).

I didn’t fully comprehend it in 2002, but the words of that old Maya Q’eqchi’ widow regarding the Tzuultaq’a have indelibly shaped my academic, professional and personal life. In fact, very early in my academic journey, the spiritual practices of the Maya Q’eqchi’ influenced my thinking about the more-than-human and our responsibilities toward what cannot be easily defined within average Eurocentric positivistic social science frameworks. As Indigenous scholar Tallbear (Reference TallBear2015, p. 234) similarly phrases it, ‘for many Indigenous peoples, their nonhuman others may not be understood in even critical Western frameworks as living’.

On 17 October 2017 – the day I submitted my Starting Grant research proposal titled RIVERS – Water/Human Rights Beyond the Human? Indigenous Water Ontologies, Plurilegal Encounters, and Interlegal Translation to the ERC – this five-year project, with a budget of €1,498,446, held significant meaning for me. It built on fifteen years of collaborative academic and policy research with Indigenous peoples in Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador and Colombia concerning transitional justice processes, legal pluralism, extractive economies and territorial defense. RIVERS aims to further explore the myriad intellectual challenges my encounters with the Indigenous Q’eqchi’ have presented.

While drafting the proposal, I questioned whether the dominant Euro-Western and, more broadly, the Global North values and frameworks – which extend beyond mere geography – would have the mental and conceptual openness to engage with Indigenous conceptions that, in principle, sit outside the bounds of mainstream legal paradigms. My own PhD ethnographic research among Maya Q’eqchi’ survivors concerning transitional justice illustrated how invisible spiritual forces – part of an internal logic of the cosmos – foster justice, reconciliation and community repair (Viaene Reference Viaene2010), a perspective that my human rights and transitional justice colleagues at the time struggled to comprehend and resisted.

In this context, Indigenous scholar Watts (Reference Watts2013, p. 28) argues that ‘the controversial element of agency is often redesigned when applied to non-humans, thereby keeping the epistemological-ontological divide intact’, a critique that resonates deeply with my own experience within the fields of transitional justice and human rights. As a result, one of RIVERS’ key research questions became: To what extent can knowledge about the impact of hydropower on rivers and water – derived from dreams, fire ceremonies or ayahuasca rituals – be recognised and listened to in court? What strategies can lawyers, human rights defenders and judges – trained in an anthropocentric paradigm that reduces the rivers’ whispers to mere beliefs – use to negotiate these fundamentally different understandings of water and place?

Early that morning, at 5:30 a.m., I bathed with my yoga companions in two rivers that converge at the Vanadurga Ashram in San Rafael, Antioquia, Colombia. During this moment, I offered the fifteen-page research proposal to the rivers, their stones, fish and the surrounding trees, expressing gratitude to the local mountains and valleys, as well as my colleagues for their support during the six-month drafting process. After our bath, we returned to the yoga shala. Following thirty minutes of silent meditation, our teacher broke the silence with the powerful Om Tryambakam mantra, including my RIVERS proposal in the collective intention for protection and healing. Upon returning to my room, I submitted the project via the European Participant Portal, with statues of Ganesha and Buddha – both cleansed in the sacred Ganga River in India during one of my meditation trips – positioned on my laptop. I felt it was an auspicious day for a proposal that aimed to be groundbreaking in the realm of water and human rights.

Exactly nine months later, on 17 July 2018, I received an email notifying me that my Starting Grant proposal had been accepted. Being approved on the first submission to this highly competitive call was an honour; the RIVERS project was among 403 approved from a total of 3,170 proposals. While taking a permaculture design course in the Catalan Pyrenees, I received this life-changing email. That night, as I walked to my tent among rocks and trees, I was lost in thought when I nearly stepped on a small black snake crossing the trail. I froze but, through deep inhalations, I brought awareness back to my body.

An encounter with a snake had long been my worst-case scenario during my PhD field research from 2006 to 2010 in the semi-tropical region of Alta Verapaz in Guatemala. Although that region is inhabited by various poisonous snakes, I had been fortunate during my many hikes between communities. However, now, on the day I received acceptance of an ERC Starting Grant – considered a significant career milestone in European academia – I confronted a poisonous snake crossing my path.

Through my deep engagement with Indigenous elders, healers and Asian philosophies and practices, I came to understand that such unexpected encounters invite profound reflection. My turbulent relationship with academia (Viaene, Laranjeiro and Tom Reference Viaene, Laranjeiro, Tom, Pritchard and Edwards2023) kept my mind racing, which resulted in a restless night spent in my small tent in the Pyrenees. Throughout the implementation of the RIVERS project, snakes continued to accompany me, appearing in dreams whenever I faced challenges. A large white anaconda, a nest of red snakes and a huge black cobra at the seashore emerged as symbolic guides for both myself and the project, highlighting transitions and transformations along the way.

As I reflect on my professional academic journey – from the rituals of the Arhuaco-Ikᵾ territory to the wisdom of the Q’eqchi’ elders – I recognise that my academic work and personal life are deeply intertwined with the lived experiences of these communities. Their teachings have fostered my commitment to an ethical practice of research that honours Indigenous ontologies, allowing for a nuanced understanding of the relationships that shape our world. My personal spiritual journey, sprouting from my engagement with the Q’eqchi’, has drawn me to the inspiring work of Buddhist philosopher Joanna Macy and the teachings of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh at Plum Village. My studies in traditional Hatha yoga, Thai yoga massage, Ayurveda and Mahayana Buddhism – particularly the one-month Kopan course in Kathmandu – have further informed my approach as a researcher. Taking refuge in the Three Jewels at Kopan Monastery in 2018, I integrated a wish for all sentient beings to be happy and free from suffering into my daily Buddhist practice.

3 Heart-based resistance and counter-hegemonic academic knowledge productionFootnote ³

At the Annual Law and Society Conference in Denver in 2024, Chua and Massoud presented their co-edited book Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society, which inspired me to start this journey of self-discovery regarding my professional positionality. During the subsequent roundtable discussion, the topics of identity management and the vulnerability inherent in disclosing parts of one’s identity were raised.

Initially, I did not begin this article by sharing my silent meditation practice, and I felt hesitant to reveal aspects of my spiritual experiences related to my academic work. As Escobar et al. (Reference Escobar, Osterweil and Sharma2024, p. 79) aptly note regarding the exclusion of the spiritual and sacred in academia, activist scholarship – particularly within the academic left – ‘often reveal unexamined commitments to the rational premises of secular humanism that make them staunch enemies of epistemologies that have room for the ineffable and unknowable dimensions of reality’.

However, since participating in the European Research Institute (ESRI) of the European Mind and Life Institute, founded in the 1980s by neuroscientist Francisco Varela and His Holiness the Dalai Lama to bridge the gap between science and contemplative traditions, I have become more comfortable embracing my Buddhist and long-term meditation and yoga practices within academic circles. In 2022, I attended ESRI for the first time, which centred on ‘Learning with Others: Living Connection and Transmission’ at the Lama Tzong Khapa Institute in Tuscany, Italy. For the first time, I felt a sense of belonging in academia, surrounded by like-minded contemplative practitioners who also are concerned about how academia can transform from within toward a more caring, collaborative, transformative and interdependent community. Each day began with meditation, and we concluded sessions with contemplative reflections, even setting aside a silent day during the week. The following year, I was invited to participate in ESRI’s theme of ‘Sentience and Responsibility in Critical Times’. As a faculty member, I delivered a talk titled ‘Interdependence and Law: Why and How?’ during the opening session and co-organised two workshops with my professional coach and friend Elaine Tao, titled ‘Vision-boarding: Me-Self in Interconnected Worlds’.Footnote ⁴

In similar vein to poet Humberto Ak’abal mentioned in the introduction, also Judge Belkis Izquierdo advises to always remember the importance of acknowledging our origins – where we come from, our familial roots and our contexts – as well as honouring the sources of our learnings and knowledge. Recently I realised that my commitment to social justice and societal transformation flows through the veins of my paternal lineage. I am the first in my family to embody this commitment through academic praxis. My grandfather, a weaver labourer during the 1950s and 1960s who had only completed primary school, played an active role in labour union activities and was involved in a Catholic movement - know as the Deansisme movement which was given continuity by priest Jozef Cardijn - that supported factory workers to pursue secondary and even higher education. My father, the youngest of five children, received some form of higher education, though his dream of going to university was unreachable. He dedicated four decades to creating and implementing with other colleagues an inclusive education system for children with mental disabilities within the Flemish primary and secondary school system. In the 1970s, when he started, mentally disabled children were hidden by their families and seen as ‘lost’. Like his father, he remained a committed union advocate within the Flemish education system, even after retirement. Moreover, after retiring, he continued his advocacy by training teachers in Nepal for children with mental disabilities, addressing critical gaps in educational resources. This required him to refresh his English skills in his mid-60s, which he did together with my mother. My mother is a survivor of the polio wave of the 1950s in Europe and taught me the virtues of willpower and perseverance. Despite being an outsider in a society where bodily perfection is cherished and celebrated, she embodied resilience and strength, inspiring me to face challenges with tenacity.

Informed by this lineage of social commitment and resilience, I too have engaged in several efforts aimed at societal transformation. My eight years of voluntary work – first as a member and later as a youth leader – in one of Flanders’ largest youth movements, the KSA, embody these values. This movement prioritises play, growth, engagement and connection, fostering a sense of community and social responsibility among young people.

I migrated from the tranquil rural Flemish countryside to the bustling university city of Leuven to pursue higher education. This transition, undertaken without family or friends, was fraught with anxiety and insecurities. My sense of being ‘out-of-place’ (Massoud Reference Massoud, Chua and Massoud2024) in this elite urban environment and the ivory tower of academia was intensified by my lifelong struggle with stuttering, a speech disorder that has persisted since childhood. The Flemish education system is well known for its multilingual curriculum (French, English and German), which posed a significant emotional and stress burden for someone like me who stutters. The university ombudsmen’s services informed my professors that oral exams created a far greater emotional burden for me than for my peers. Additionally, coming from a rural province with a distinct dialect made West Flemish students, including myself, noticeably different among the dominant middle-class and often urban students.

Furthermore, pursuing higher education abroad, such as a master’s degree, was not feasible for me – not only because of my working-class background but also because my stuttering restricted my ability to use foreign languages. My first six weeks of anthropological fieldwork in Guatemala in 2002, part of my master’s programme, became only possible thanks to a travel grant from the Flemish University Council (VLIR) and the money I earned during day and evening shifts at a beverage factory.

An academic career was not part of my initial life plan – the university felt like a cold and distant workspace – so, following my studies in criminology and anthropology, I began working as a socio-legal worker in a Red Cross centre for asylum seekers, further deepening my commitment to social justice through grounded work. My education – primary, higher and postdoctoral – has been funded by Flemish and European public tax money, fostering a strong sense of responsibility regarding research as a public good and the societal impact of my research.

The first time my social class was exposed, I found myself at a disadvantage, akin to many other working-class scholars navigating academia, as discussed in working-class studies scholarship. As I ascended the hierarchy and entered the establishment through prestigious European research grants, I encountered both hostile interactions and subtle yet explicit forms of bullying during my postdoctoral journey. These challenges arose not only from prominent professors but also from emerging scholars belonging to elite classes in the Global South, who often responded defensively when I sought, for example, accountability regarding their progress in delivering the expected academic outputs. My class awareness came also when I realised that, unlike many of my Global South middle-class and elite peers, I could not take for granted the access to research funding that allowed me to finance fieldwork across the globe, participate in expensive international academic conferences and cover open-access fees. This experience has underscored the systemic invisible barriers that persist within academic institutions and the complexities of negotiating my identity as a white female migrant Global North working-class scholar within a predominantly European and Global South heteropatriarchal elite academic structure, where middle and elite cultural capital and power dynamics dominate the field (Crew Reference Crew2021).

Indeed, I have been perceived as a very ‘privileged academic’ – being white, European and the Principal Investigator of a prestigious €1.5 million research grant at a European university working on issues of the decolonisation of human rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights and post-conflict societies. So, following Case (Reference Case2017) I exist as a professional insider, part of the academic establishment, yet simultaneously without middle–elite class cultural power. Or as noted by Massoud (Reference Massoud, Chua and Massoud2024, pp. 2, 4), out of place scholars ‘are typically minorities’, emphasising that ‘one’s sense of marginality may change across places and times’. Despite holding such prestigious grants, I remain a mid-career academic without tenure or a permanent contract. Moreover, like many emerging female research leaders, I navigate a well-known toxic academic environment characterised by jealousy, competition and the politicisation of one’s research achievements by both senior and junior researchers, regardless of gender. This complexity reveals that a blanket understanding of privilege ignores the nuances of academic experiences, as there are ‘multiple marginalizations and inequalities for some, and multiple privileges and equalities for others’ (Hearn 2015, p. 56). Therefore, more than once, I have felt ‘stuck’, ‘tired’ and ‘exhausted’ (Moss Reference Moss2012).

3.1 Exploring creative and reciprocal knowledge production

As a working-class scholar, I have never felt comfortable with the reality that academic knowledge production has been limited to written English texts that are inaccessible to non-academics and the peoples and communities with whom we collaborate. The obtuse, complicated and bourgeois language my middle- and elite-class peer academics love to use during seminars always felt distant, abstract and not really grounded in the real world. So aligned with what the European and US working-class studies shows, we – working-class scholars – want that our research matters, supporting the creation of counter storytelling and engaging with social justice (McKenzie Reference McKenzia2015; Case Reference Case2017; Crew Reference Crew2021).

Figure 1. Cover PhD dissertation Voices from the Shadows (2011).

I will never forget the reaction of a colleague when I presented my legal ethnographic research design aimed at understanding the perspectives and practices of Indigenous genocide survivors in Guatemala concerning justice, reparation, reconciliation and memory: ‘Lieselotte, you have to conduct serious human rights research!’ This interaction occurred in 2006, as I was preparing for a yearlong field study in the Guatemalan department of Alta Verapaz. At that time, my colleague was a PhD researcher and one of the teaching assistants to a prominent Belgian constitutional law professor who also served as Minister of Justice. As a criminologist with an additional master’s degree in cultural anthropology, I was the only non-lawyer in the constitutional law department where the human rights centre is situated. It became evident that my law colleagues, with the exception of my PhD supervisors, perceived ‘law as a clear set of abstract rules’ (Massoud Reference Massoud, Chua and Massoud2024, p. 4), while my primary research motivation has been to achieve an on-the-ground understanding of complex human rights issues.Footnote ⁵ As an early-career interdisciplinary researcher, I frequently faced scepticism from colleagues – both in my department and at European human rights conferences where I presented my PhD findings – regarding the relevance and validity of my non-doctrinal research and the importance of more-than-human agency.

Two-day reconstruction of armed conflict scenes, community Samac, Alta Verapaz departement, Guatemala @LViaene, 2007.

Nearly twenty years ago in Guatemala, my journey into creative and inclusive academic knowledge production began, which has shaped my approach to co-creative visual methodologies with Indigenous communities and transitioned me from an engaged human rights academic to a scholar-activist. A significant aspect of this journey centres on my collaborations with illiterate, monolingual Q’eqchi’ elders and survivors of human rights violations during Guatemala’s civil conflict (1960–1996). My interest in incorporating audiovisual methods into ethnographic research developed during my PhD (2006–2010) through courses in analogue and digital photography. While living in remote areas, I participated in Q’eqchi’ fire-sacrifice ceremonies (mayejak) and war commemorations. Returning for follow-up work, I found that sharing photographic accounts of these practices was warmly received by my research collaborators. In 2010, I presented a photobook to my primary collaborators, contributing images to my PhD dissertation – the first in law to include visual narratives in my department (Figure 1). As nightly Maya Q’eqchi’ rituals were a central practice during my long-term field research, the front and back cover of my PhD serve as photographic testimonies of these transformative practices. During this PhD research time (2006–2010), I witnessed the introduction of satellite internet in local communities, the rise of Indigenous community radios, and the establishment of Prensa Comunitaria, a network of community communicators. My understanding of counter-hegemonic academic knowledge production evolved through a collaboration with Alfonso Huet (Reference A2006, Reference A2008), author of ‘The Sacred Mountain Saved Us’. We documented the experiences of twenty Q’eqchi’ communities that survived genocide, alongside the Resistance Committee of Q’eqchi’ Survivors (CORESQ). Comprised mainly of illiterate elders who had endured massacres, CORESQ aimed to disseminate historical memory through networks involving schools and local authorities.

@CORESQ, 2008.

Members of CORESQ sought to produce visual representations of their stories to ensure that their suffering was not forgotten. This initiative exemplified Jelin’s (Reference Jelin2003) concept of ‘memory entrepreneurs’, who advocate for social recognition of their past narratives. The Q’eqchi’ publication of Huet’s book was a significant step toward documenting oral histories of the conflict, aspiring to create a more accessible version. After two years of collaboration, we created five posters in Q’eqchi’ and Spanish, representing the book’s chapters.

Wa’tesinq and majeyak ritual of the posters, Cobán, Alta Verapaz Department Guatemala @LViaene, 2008.

Our process was marked by constant interaction with CORESQ members, who acted as architects of their ideas while Alfonso Huet and I served as facilitators. Grounded in Maya reciprocity, we recognised that effective research requires mutual exchange. The discussions led to the creation of visually impactful posters, with imagery capturing key themes. Due to a lack of original photographs, we organised a two-day reconstruction of conflict scenes, involving twenty-five participants who re-enacted significant events, including the burning down of villages, sexual violence and exploitation in military camps.

Also, a wa’tesinq, a feeding ritual, was performed to feed the posters and books before their first use. This kind of ritual is normally only performed to feed certain material objects which possess a spirit or lifeforce, xmuhel, such as a house, to enhance the inherent force and power (wankilal) of that object. Therefore, the posters embody the spiritual value of the written historical memory. The elders of CORESQ explained that without this feeding ritual the posters would not be treated with the necessary respect and dignity. This feeding ritual, on which we collaboratively worked almost two years, has influenced deeply my perspective on research ethics, particularly the concept of ‘consent’ from non-human entities or spiritual forces. This experience vividly illustrated the importance of recognising the agency and knowledge of Indigenous spiritual leaders and emphasising respect for their practices and beliefs.

My second experience was during my time at the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner in Ecuador (2010–2013), where I became immersed in the transformative power of visual translation through short documentaries about Indigenous justice systems, aimed at non-Indigenous judges, attorneys and lawyers. Upon my arrival, the office had already produced three fifteen-minute documentaries addressing emblematic cases of Indigenous justice in Ecuador. To enhance their pedagogical impact, I coordinated the production of a booklet that included a section titled ‘Ten Myths about Indigenous Justice’, developed in collaboration with Ecuadorian experts. During the trainings with the National Ombudsman’s Office, Police and Military and members of the judiciary, we used the documentaries to stimulate discussions within a context marked by polarised sociopolitical and legal debates regarding the co-operation and coordination between Indigenous legal systems and the Ecuadorian state system (Viaene and Fernández-Maldonado Reference Viaene, Fernández-Maldonado, Corradi, De Feyter, Desmet and Vanhees2018).

3.2 The path to two cinematographic short-form documentaries set in Nepal and Colombia

Since the start of the RIVERS project in 2019, the importance of questioning anthropocentric human rights dogma and acquiring a better grasp of Indigenous human-nature knowledges has become even more salient in international legal scholarship and practice. In parallel, several new eco-legal developments and transnational frameworks have emerged, which call for a shift from a human-centred to an eco-centred approach and are gaining policy and norm-making traction in the fields of environmental and human rights law. In this context, definitions of ‘environment’, ‘nature’ and ‘ecology’ have become a ‘key site of political struggle over knowledge, meaning and belonging’, with legal consequences (Viaene, Doran and Liljeblad Reference Viaene, Doran and Liljeblad2023). Within these socio-legal debates, Indigenous ways of inhabiting the world that prioritise living in harmony with nature are becoming a key alternative reference, in opposition to modern and neoliberal Western ways of relating to the environment. However, there is a permanent risk that policy and norm makers might dismiss these Indigenous claims as simple beliefs, instead of taking them as ontologically different but valid concepts and practices. Therefore, elsewhere (Viaene Reference Viaene2021) I made the call that legal scholars and practitioners should not be afraid of engaging with Indigenous ontologically different concepts and practices regarding human–life–water relationships.

Our Twin documentary ‘Human rights beyond the human?’ has as its main goal to present an audiovisual journey that not only portrays struggles across different regions but also cultivates a sense of transformative inspiration within our audience. Therefore, we prioritise a cinematic language that captivates and emotionally resonates, aiming to ignite motivation rather than simply provide research results. The documentaries raise fundamental questions about how nature/environment protects itself and if the current legal frameworks are sufficient, as well as who owns and represents knowledge. Central to our approach was the democratisation of knowledge production. We wanted to break that paradigm with a collaborative approach in which the communities with whom we work are full stakeholders in the whole process and with free access to the end product, who feel ownership of the project as a whole. In the Colombian documentary, for instance, we aimed for our protagonist, Belkis Izquierdo, to be a co-creator, engaging in a form of dynamic consent that allowed her to shape the narrative and its evolution. This consideration has become a defining principle of the project.

For the production in Colombia, RIVERS leveraged our relationship with the Indigenous film collective Daupará to hire Choclo Audiovisual, led by Rosaura Villanueva Espitia, one of Daupará’s co-founders. Together with Olowaili Green, an Indigenous Gunadule woman from Caimán Nuevo in Urabá Antioquia, Rosaura was responsible for the cinematography in close collaboration with the RIVERS artistic team. In contrast, the Nepali film crew, while also entirely Indigenous, does not present themselves as Indigenous audiovisual experts. For the Nepali segment, RIVERS is collaborating with Fuzz Factory Productions, directed by Prasiit Sthapit, a Kathmandu-based story-teller from the Newa community. This project marks the first time his team, all urban Indigenous Nepalis, is producing a documentary focused on Indigenous issues. The Nepal team is also responsible for the post-production, colour grading and mastering of both documentaries and their unification through sound design, ensuring technical coherence and internal consistency.

4 Toward critical ethical relationality with human and more-than-human interconnections in audiovisual story-telling

In alignment with one of RIVERS’ theoretical frameworks – the ongoing debate regarding the decolonisation of human rights and research methods – the original title of this section was ‘A Decolonial and Participatory Audiovisual Research Ethos: From Theory to Practice’. During my time in Ecuador (2010–2013), I became familiar with the long-standing and evolving Latin American discussions about decoloniality as a horizon for profound societal transformation, the academic world included. However, upon my return to European academia in 2016, I observed that notions of decoloniality were only beginning to be introduced into academic discourse. At this moment, reflecting on my almost ten years of postdoctoral research, I grapple with whether decoloniality is truly a viable path within academia. Regrettably, both established and emerging scholars – including some leveraging their professional power and emerging researchers using their gender and/or ethnic identity – have at times co-opted the concept of decoloniality to obscure deeply unethical practices in academia, such as plagiarism, smear campaigns for personal vendettas, power abuse, appropriation of others’ grant-winning research designs and also sexual misconduct. The intertwining of these issues suggests a troubling trend where the discourse of decolonisation is not just appropriated but politicised, masking systemic injustices and insider privileges among middle- and elite-class academics that undermine the very transformative ideals that decoloniality seeks to promote within academia.

Therefore, rather than framing my reflections within a discourse on decoloniality, which has too often become empty rhetoric and has been politically hijacked, I choose to pivot toward the growing call for critical care ethics in academia (Bourgault et al. Reference Bourgault, Fitzferald and Robinson2024). As noted by Askins and Blazek (Reference Askin and Blazek2017, p. 1098), a politics of care in academia ‘foregrounds reciprocity and interdependence in a communal – rather than modern individualist – project of caring-with: a conscious political stance enveloping practices of caring-for and about collectively as a cornerstone of our academic identities, presents, and futures’. However, there is a call that care scholarship should consider care ethics as ‘an ongoing commitment to relationality, to decentering, and to challenging – via attentive listening, learning, unlearning, and refusals –various forms of epistemic power and privilege that silence marginalized voices’ (Bourgault et al. Reference Bourgault, Fitzferald and Robinson2024, p. 7).

Against this critical call this section aims to reflect upon decentred ways of doing research ethics acknowledging that European research projects must be conducted with integrity, responsibility, and respect for the rights and dignity of all participants. The European Research Council, RIVERS’ funding body, indicates that ‘ethical compliance is seen as pivotal to achieve real research excellence’. Therefore, throughout the research process, the RIVERS team has endeavoured to carry out research according to principles of transparency, integrity, openness and full collaboration with our research collaborators. However, researchers collaborating with Indigenous communities should support ‘unfolding articulations of Indigenous care concepts’ (Doucet et al. Reference Doucet, Jewell, Watts, Bourgault, Fitzferald and Robinson2024, p. 110).

Indeed, that morning in June 2023 at the riverbank of the river which flows in front of the Botanical Garden of Busintan, Mamo Menjabin reminded me that obtaining consent for research extends beyond human participants to the living land we traverse with cameras, tripods, sound booms and drones.Footnote ⁶ The next stop in our film shooting in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta was the village of Yuerwa, a three-hour drive from Pueblo Bello, deeper into the mountains; the Mamos decided it was essential to film a ritual called pagamento (paying tribute to the visible and invisible world) at a Ka’dukwᵾ, an altar of small stones positioned atop a rock near the community centre in Yuerwa.Footnote ⁷

Everyone agreed that it was quite unique to receive permission for this filming; however, the Mamos felt it was time to share this crucial spiritual practice with the Bunashi or hermanos menores, a term they use to refer to non-Indigenous peoples. Our film shoot concluded in Nabusimake, considered the political and spiritual epicentre of the Arhuaco-Iku people in Colombia. Here, Judge Belkis had a conversation with Mamo Enrique Izquierdo about self-governance and collective healing of our planet. At the end of their conversation, the Mamo gave each member of the film crew a cotton thread and asked us to make nodes of our intentions for this film work. He then invited us to verbalise our intentions from our hearts out loud to him and the rest of the group. As Mamo Kwaney Makú explains: ‘Now that you have arrived and made a payment [pagamento] with us, it is a symbol of connection. You are telling us, “We are going to be united.” That is the commitment I have understood here.’

To ensure we did not forget our personal intentions and commitments, the Mamo took the threads we held in our hands and tied them to our wrists. At that moment, it was evident to everyone in the group that filming had ceased to be a simple audiovisual communication task; as a team, we were now committed to conveying the message of the Arhuaco people to the outer world through a lens of interdependency with the Territory we had walked upon over the past four days. However, I acknowledge that not all team members may fully grasp the depth of their commitments to the Arhuaco-Ikᵾ Territory.

Film shooting Manang and Lamjung districts, Gadanki province, Nepal @LViaene/ERC RIVERS, 2024.

One and a half years later, in October 2024, in Nepal, Prasiit’s team, Ransubbu and I encountered a Gurung jhakri shaman who responded, saying, ‘The Goddesses brought you all here to my home, so I give you consent to film this forgiveness puja.’ This was the shaman’s response to us after we found ourselves at his house, nine days into filming, which is located a three-hour off-road drive from our filming location. The initial fieldwork in July 2023 revealed a community grappling with an ontological dilemma about a state-imposed energy development project and the protection of their sacred space, believed to be inhabited by seven powerful Goddesses, located in the middle of the area where the power plant is to be constructed. As one of the older Gurung women expressed during our first shoot in April 2024, she was very worried:

The details of the many twists in this story are beyond the scope of this article (and would spoil our documentary narrative). However, through the villagers, we eventually ended up with this well-known jhakri shaman, who sensed during a previous visit a week earlier to a neighbouring village that the Goddesses of this sacred rock were about to leave. He indicated that the site’s shift, which the villagers had negotiated with the Nepal National Electricity Authority, had become increasingly urgent.

It was a total, but positive, surprise for the shaman to see a group of four young Indigenous men and women and one foreigner, armed with backpacks and cameras, visiting his house to consult him about the sacred site and the request to film the upcoming ritual for an international documentary. After almost two hours of deep learning, filled with moments that gave us goosebumps, about historical spiritual Gurung practices and the power of invisible natural forces that can cause landslides, flooding, diseases and bad harvests as reactions to human-induced destruction of the land, he concluded that we should film the ritual. He had already recommended that the villagers to perform this collective forgiveness puja to summon the Goddesses and persuade them to move to a new location, away from the power plant’s construction site. For this to succeed, all villagers – from elders to children – as well as the Chinese construction workers, needed to be present, and we were also very welcome at the ritual. He indicated that, like everyone else, we would need to ask forgiveness from the Goddesses and make the necessary offerings before and during the ritual. He preferred not to be filmed close-up but permitted us to record his voice during the ritual. The depth of the shaman’s knowledge, coupled with the palpable spiritual energy of the forgiveness ritual, evoked a sense of awe and deepened my understanding of the need for ethical practice that transcends purely Euro-Western ethical procedures regarding consent and personal data protection.

During both filming experiences in Colombia and Nepal, the filming teams engaged in discussions about the most appropriate ways and moments to ask for oral or written consent to film voices and images, and to export personal data to Spain. Together with my University’s Data Protection Officer, we prepared a two-page document titled ‘data transfer for the execution and development of the documentary series “human rights beyond the human”, of the ERC RIVERS research project developed at the Carlos III University of Madrid’, which was to be filled out and signed by each participant, or, alternatively, we recorded ourselves reading the document to participants as they gave their collective oral consent. Prior to filming, we had obtained written consent from the local Indigenous political authorities, and the community members were informed of our filming. However, since we were documenting collective activities, such as communal conversations with Judge Belkis or puja rituals involving a sheep, we faced challenges.

In both film shoots, there was internal debate about the timing of asking for this formal two-page consent form. Some felt that asking for oral collective consent at the beginning could disrupt the spontaneity of the activities we were filming, while others worried that waiting until the end might result in individuals leaving without giving recorded consent. In Colombia, Judge Belkis’s first dialogue with the Mamos and Kumamas occurred inside a small kankurwa located in the heart of Busintana. Despite the presence of three cameras, a boom mic and a portion of the crew surrounding the group, the dialogue remained spontaneous. We had previously agreed with Judge Belkis to take formal collective consent given orally after the dialogue. In Nepal, implementing this formal ethical procedure proved more challenging; both community pujas in April and October 2024 began very spontaneously, making it impossible to interrupt the villagers before the rituals.

Although we had secured written consent from the ward, the local administrative body, and had spoken with key community members the day prior to the puja, our team felt at ease filming the collective ritual without obtaining formal consent from everyone. The recorded collective consent of the puja ritual in April 2024 was obtained afterward, in the village community hall, with the assistance of the Indigenous political authority to gather everyone again. We checked the recordings on the cameras to see if everyone was in the community hall. For the filming of the forgiveness puja, we were aware, through our conversation with the jhakri shaman, that this collective ritual might be full of surprises, as he explained that during the summoning of the Goddesses, children might become possessed. This reality brought discomfort to our team, as it implied the need to seek consent from the parents afterward. Yet, at the same time, we were all excited to witness the agency of the Goddesses in front of the camera. Filming the collective forgiveness puja, which entailed five long hours of negotiations with the Goddesses filled with unexpected twists and turns, posed significant logistical and technical challenges that we were eager to embrace.

The experiences captured during our filmmaking journeys in Colombia and Nepal underscore the necessity of a decentring of Western ethical research and filmmaking while engaging with these more-than-human realities. Both the Nepali and Colombian experiences underscore the vital importance of building trust, engaging in reciprocal relationships and demonstrating sensitivity toward local spiritual practices and ontologies.

5 Final reflections

As my ERC research project approaches its conclusion – after nearly seven years – and culminates in two short-form documentaries set in Nepal and Colombia – both posing the question: Is it possible to bring more-than-human voices into the political and legal equation? – this article represents a first and partial expression of my ongoing, heart-centred journey of resistance within academia. It’s a deep dive into a stream of thoughts and consciousness, weaving together self-reflective critiques rooted in my own experiences and encounters.

Drawing on my lived experiences of interconnectedness and interdependency – both personally and professionally – I believe that a decentred Western research ethics ‘must pay attention to these ways of knowing and their implications for the way we live in and with this earth, now and in the future’ (Bourgault et al. Reference Bourgault, Fitzferald and Robinson2024, p. 3).

To truly resist and disrupt the canon of Western research ethics, my article emphasises two interconnected contributions: first, recentring the positionality of working-class scholar-activists; and second, recentring the agency of the more-than-human, not only in theory but also in our methodological praxis. In this context, I recall a recent seminar focused on bridging academia, policy and advocacy for social change, where a panellist remarked that the societal impact of his research was always at the back of his mind. This prompted me to reflect on my own academic journey – a renewed, critical intersectional class consciousness that reminds me that social impact has consistently been at the heart of my work.

Working-class scholars often navigate the dominant middle- and elite-class academic environments from a vastly different vantage point, shaped by our socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. This perspective fosters a profound concern for the societal implications of research – particularly regarding equity, accessibility and social justice. Therefore, it is crucial for a more inclusive and nuanced critical decolonial and Indigenous scholarship to actively engage with the voices, perspectives and experiences of working-class scholars.

Moreover, current Western research ethics neglect the role, agency and positionality that the more-than-human plays in shaping and constraining our research practices. By honoring Indigenous perspectives and spiritual practices within our documentary project, I have underscored the importance of forging genuine relationships with communities – both human and more-than-human – that we represent. The films we produced illuminate the complexities faced by Indigenous communities, and our filming process reflects the transformative impact of prioritising embodied ethics and relationality within the research and filming.

Both efforts are essential to decentring dominant frameworks and fostering a more inclusive, ethically responsible approach in academia that honours multiplicity, relationality and power dynamics – both human and more-than-human. Despite the widespread perception that spirituality, sacredness and embodied ritual have no place within human rights academia – and in line with the title of my ERC project and twin documentary, Human Rights Beyond the Human? – I see my role as a scholar-activist in developing different modes of relating to the more-than-human, outside, beyond or even in opposition to rights. To conclude, I share the words of Belkis Izquierdo Torres – Aty Seikuinduwa – from our documentary: ‘Rituality is what can really open up to knowledge from other places, not only from reason, but also from that connection with sacred sites, and that is an exercise of feeling deeply’.