9 questions for Karolyne Mendes Mendonça Moreira
Karolyne was a researcher at the mpilht until August 2026. She is currently finishing her PhD thesis on non-human agencies and normative production.
In your PhD research at the mpilhlt you explore how non-human entities shape normative life. What is the core of your research, and how did you arrive at this topic?
My research examines how non-human and more-than-human agencies co-participated in the production of knowledge of normativity in colonial Mozambique. More specifically, I ask how spirits, plants, animals, water, and objects came to participate, through situated acts of translation, in the production of binding normative arrangements. I use the term “non-human” and “more-than-human” with some reservation, because the very separation between humans and non-humans is a situated distinction rather than a universal given.
The question emerged gradually from a discomfort I had with the way we study legal history. I increasingly felt that practices that are crucial for understanding normative life in African societies tend to disappear once we begin our research with a narrow definition of law, agency, or even reality. If we look for normativities through a naturalist ontological reading of society, we find very little about other ways of producing obligation, authority, or reparation.
How much of this discomfort stems from your own academic background?
It comes directly from my own training and experience. I was raised in a tradition that learned to recognise normativity, above all in places where there are state institutions and also texts. At the same time, for roughly ten years, I have been learning from Indigenous peoples. And the move to Frankfurt had an unexpected effect: studying Africa via Europe, through sources produced by Portuguese colonial administrators, made visible the extent to which the legal historian’s own gaze, mine included, is an inheritance of that very same colonisation. This disquiet drew me to the reflections of the Brazilian Quilombola thinker, Antônio Bispo dos Santos, also known as Nêgo Bispo. He shows that colonisation operates not only through territorial occupation or material violence, but also through the power to name. To name is to remove something from a cosmology, assign it another meaning, and render it intelligible within the coloniser’s categories. When the colonial administration classifies certain African practices as “feitiço” [sorcery], “superstition” or “custom”, it is not merely describing a reality: it is producing and inventing the devaluation of an equally valid mode of existence.
When I began working on Mozambique, I was particularly interested in cases involving accusations of sorcery. Gradually I grew uncomfortable with that starting point. There was a risk of trying to reach other understandings of reality, and the normativities that follow from them, precisely through one of the most reductive categories that colonialism has ever produced. “Feitiço” was never a neutral term: it is a Portuguese word that has spread through the languages of the world in the forms of “fetish” and “fetishism”, a concept with major consequences for anthropology and psychoanalysis. It served to demean different cultures, their peripheral subjects, and other objects of exploitation.
Working through a term as charged as “feitiço” creates a real methodological trap. How did you navigate that tension?
Mozambique was not only a biographical choice. There, “sorcery” never constituted a crime by law. Moreover, there are organized associations, such as the Association of Traditional Healers of Mozambique, which, with state recognition, adjudicates cases involving accusations of sorcery to this day. Methodologically, this changes everything. Where a criminal offence exists, documentation tends to organise itself around it. In the Mozambican case, by contrast, the concrete presence of spirits, plants, and other non-human actants had to be translated case by case, by judges and administrators improvising legal solutions.
From that point, my question changed. Instead of investigating how the colonial administration responded to what it named as “sorcery”, I began to ask how different understandings of reality met and were transformed in these colonial interactions, and how normative knowledge was produced and translated out of those encounters. It was then that anthropological literature became an indispensable ally to the theoretical and methodological approach on processes of translation of normative knowledge developed by Thomas Duve.
How did bringing legal history into dialogue with anthropology shift your methodological tools, and how did that play out when working through your sources?
The research is anchored in legal history, but is constantly in intense dialogue with the so-called “Ontological Turn,” and with authors such as Bruno Latour and Philippe Descola. This dialogue became necessary because the problem I investigate could not be grasped by a methodology that presupposed a rigid separation between nature and culture, what Descola calls naturalism.
The idea that organises the investigation is “translation”. Here I follow the approach developed by Thomas Duve on processes of translation of knowledge of normativity. However, I take the liberty of extending this idea to translation between different worlds. Rather than beginning from law as a body of norms produced by the colonial state, I observe the situated moments in which distinct conceptions of obligation, authority, reparation, – as well as different ways of relating to “non-human” entities that matter in concrete cases-, came into contact. I trace these encounters through colonial literature, legislative projects, court cases, administrative practices, and also oral traditions.
What did that framework look like in practice when working with your archives?
I try to reconstruct the arrangements in which entities, people, plants, documents, administrators, and institutions jointly produced normative effects. As a historian, I do not need to determine whether a spirit exists by the criteria of Western science, but what happened when its existence was taken as real by historical actors, and when it came to orient obligations and conflict resolutions.
I work with judicial records, legislation, administrative reports, as well as colonial and ethnographic literature held in Mozambican archives, and I place this material in dialogue with oral sources, memories, and interviews conducted in Mozambique. Orality is decisive because much of this knowledge did not circulate through colonial writing, or if it does, it appears there already translated into the administrator’s categories, often with the mediations left invisible.
Your work strongly resists reducing local practices to simple colonial classifications. Is there a thinker or text that was pivotal in helping you break away from that reductionism?
Bruno Latour. In 1972, Latour experienced what he refers to as his “Saint Paul on the way to Damascus” experience. While driving home late one night, he had a sudden realization that the world cannot be distilled into a single reality that explains everything else. He pulled over and repeated to himself, “Nothing can be reduced to anything else; everything can be connected to everything else.” This insight became what Latour termed “the principle of irreduction.” Latour suggests that the world is best understood as an ongoing, co-constructed network of interconnected human and non-human entities, which he refers to as actants.
Alongside Latour, one recent book had a particularly strong influence on me: Ayahuasca as Liquid Divinity, by André van der Braak, Professor of Comparative Philosophy of Religion at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He draws on Latour to think about a plant as a ritual power, shifting attention away from individual experiences and instead toward the practices through which relationships with more-than-human powers are cultivated. I read the book at a time when I was still hesitant to adopt a more critical stance toward my own sources. It helped me to take “non-human” actants more seriously.
When doing fieldwork and archival research, how do you handle the limits of inherited analytical frameworks?
The greatest challenge lies in vocabulary. When we say “law”, we think of people deciding about people. My research deals with situations in which a plant, an amulet, or a spirit took part in decisions about guilt, obligation, and reparation. To describe this, I have to use words made for another world. I call these participants “non-human” or “more-than-human”, for instance, knowing that the term reproduces the very modern separation the research intend to question. I have no better term. I use what exists and try to make clear what such usage distorts.
There is also a challenge that concerns me directly. I am a practitioner of Afro-Indigenous Brazilian traditions, which means the modes of existence I write about are not entirely unfamiliar to me. This helps: certain things in the documents are immediately legible to me. It also opens doors in the field, allowing me to establish a connection with the tinyanga, the healers, a contact I would hardly have otherwise. And it also complicates matters: I have to guard against the temptation to recognise in the Mozambican archive what I already know from another context. These are distinct worlds, separated by an ocean and by many decades.
How would you describe the main role of a legal historian?
To keep present-day Western law from appearing natural, and as the default. We tend to forget how many of our own legal practices depend on rituals, symbols, metaphysical assumptions, invisible entities, and performances whose authority seems self-evident only because we are familiar with them. A judge wears a black robe, strikes a gavel on the bench, and everyone rises when he enters. None of this is self-evident. These are performances that work only because a long tradition has rendered them invisible to us.
When I describe the material of my research, I often encounter a reaction of strangeness. A plant taking part in a trial, a particular water generating political legitimacy, a spirit summoned to settle a dispute. It seems distant, exotic, almost from another world. But the distance lies in which rituals we have learned not to perceive as rituals.
That is where I see the work of the legal historian. Anyone who calls an African practice superstition is using, without noticing, the vocabulary of a nineteenth-century colonial administrator. The task is to make that vocabulary visible, including when it is our own.
If you were not a legal historian, what would you like to be?
I have played the atabaque [afro-brasilian drum] for more than fifteen years. Part of my life already takes place in that other craft, the one that does not pay my bills.
If I could do only that, I would play in more places, travelling the world. And I would go on teaching, because I have discovered that I enjoy translating, for those arriving from outside, a knowledge learned through the body and through experience rather than merely through books.
The interview was conducted by Ana Isabel Soler.
Bibliography:
Descola, Philippe (2005). Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard.
Latour, Bruno (1991). Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: Essai d’anthropologie symétrique. La Découverte.
Santos, Antonio Bispo dos (2023). A terra dá, a terra quer. São Paulo: Ubu Editora/Piseagrama.
van der Braak, A. (2023). Ayahuasca as liquid divinity. Religions, 14(2), 174.
Cite as: Mendes Mendonça Moreira, Karolyne: “The greatest challenge lies in vocabulary. When we say “law”, we think of people deciding about people…”, legalhistoryinsights.com, 30.10.2026, https://doi.org/10.17176/20261030-135828-0
