The institutionalization of indigenous justice: an interdisciplinary analysis of legal plurality in the Ecuadorian case

Abstract

This article is based on my fieldwork investigation carried out in Ecuador during the summer of 2017, which examines this country’s legal pluralism from an empiric interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective.

The underlying research was realized in Ecuador because since 2008, plurinationality and indigenous Justice, therefore legal pluralism have been constitutionally recognized.

 This article will offer an analysis of the first ten years of two different legal systems; that is the state’s institutional relationship with indigenous peoples and their ancestral justice system. As a legal anthropologist, it interest me to examine how such situation unfolds in daily practice, for throughout the last past decades, legal pluralism has been the main focus of legal and legal anthropology studies.