This article considers the challenges of engaged ethnographic research with indigenous peoples’ social movements within shifting fields of interlegality and fragmented sovereignties marked by multiple inequalities, racism, impunity and violence. Drawing on the experience of a collaborative research project on legal pluralism and indigenous women’s access to justice and security, that aims to strengthen subaltern cosmopolitan legalities (Rodríguez-Garavito and Santos, 2005), it discusses a number of issues including: scholarly privilege and ethnographic authority; testimonies, their value, uses and abuses, and; interpreting and writing about inequalities and tensions within the communities and organizations we work with.
Universitas Humanística (2013). Núm. 75: 219-47.