Valentina Gonzalez-Morales

In the last decade, biocultural rights have been utilized to grant legal personhood to the Whanganui River in New Zealand (2015) and the Atrato River in Colombia (2016). This has been achieved by establishing a direct connection between the worldviews of ethnic peoples and the ecosystems they inhabit. The theoretical construct of biocultural rights has been extensively analyzed from a legal perspective, demonstrating their effectiveness in incorporating the worldviews of local communities (indigenous, Afro-descendant, ethnic, etc.) into legal frameworks. However, their implementation in Colombia has not yielded the ambitious outcomes that were anticipated. This shortfall is largely attributed to the region's challenging conditions of social injustice and armed conflicts. In this article, the theory of biocultural ethics and its theoretical framework of the 3Hs (Rozzi 2012) will be employed to analyze, clarify, and highlight relevant aspects in the application of biocultural rights.

The ontological transformations that Colombian women experience as a result of the armed conflict, rooted in deep social, economic, and political inequalities, reveal the absence of a fixed "woman" essence—a void that patriarchal structures exploit to perpetuate inequality. These transformations manifest in the forced participation of women in the public sphere, their roles as heads of households, and the resilience that defines their community organizations. By integrating posthumanist feminist philosophy into this context, we can analyze these changes as new modes of "being in the world." This perspective emphasizes our understanding of bodies as permeable and porous, marked by violence, driven by survival, and shaped by the need to "generate kinship" as a means of making sense of the "horrors of war" and embodying a new way of " being more than human."

Biocultural rights have served as a theoretical basis for the declaration of the Whanganui (in New Zealand) and Atrato (in Colombia) Rivers as subjects of law. The theoretical figure of biocultural rights has been widely analyzed from the law. However, there are also philosophical aspects relevant to study, such as the ontological, epistemological, and ethical transformations that are possible to glimpse thanks to the incorporation of the worldviews of local communities (indigenous and ethnic). Thus, this article seeks to examine the ontological, epistemological, and ethical aspects present in biocultural rights and their theoretical precedents. The methodology employed is a hermeneutic analysis of foundational texts on the subject. In addition, the paper will also exemplify some aspects by using the Colombian Constitutional Court’s Sentence T-622/16, which declares the Atrato River as a subject of rights.