Dr. Armando Guevara Gil
© khk
Dr. Armando Guevara Gil
Fellow
Käte Hamburger Kolleg "Legal Unity and Pluralism"
Room 7009
Servatiiplatz 9
48143 Münster
T: +49 251 83-22684
jguevara@udea.edu.pe

Armando Guevara Gil was a Fellow of the Kolleg from January 2023 to December 2023.

  • Vita

    Armando Guevara Gil is a Peruvian legal anthropologist and historian. He holds a doctorate in law from the University of Amsterdam, a master’s degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a law degree from PUCP in Lima. He specialises in the fields of legal pluralism, colonial and republican law in the Andes, water law and indigenous rights. He was a visiting professor at the University of Torino in 2019 and a guest researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory from 2019 to 2020. Currently, he is rector of the Universidad para el Desarrollo Andino (Lircay), an associate researcher at the Instituto del Perú (Lima), and an Affiliate Researcher of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory.

    His main publications include Las penas de la monja Dominga Gutiérrez (Arequipa, Perú, 1831) (2019); Out of the Mainstream. Water Rights, Politics and Identity (co-editor, 2010); Diversidad y Complejidad Legal (2009); Derecho, Instituciones y Procesos Históricos (co-editor, 2008); and Propiedad Agraria y Derecho Colonial, Cuzco (1543-1822) (1993). He has also coedited a five-volume series on interdisciplinary approaches to Peruvian water law (214-2019), a volume on anthropological expert witness testimony in Latin America (2015), and published anthropological studies on peasant and indigenous irrigation systems. His chapter on Latin American indigenous peoples and consultation will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology (M.C. Foblets et al., eds, 2021), and his article on the pluralist legal tradition in XIXth-century Peru in a volume edited by P. Collin (Brill and Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, 2021).

  • Research Project

    Monjas Cimarronas: Conflicting Normative Frameworks and Human Dramas in Early Republican Peru

    Nineteenth-century Latin American legal history needs to be rewritten under the perspective of legal pluralism to debunk the idea that the new liberal republics were obsessed with legal centralization. Recent approaches show that the liberal nomos was not a triggering factor for legal standardisation but a breeding ground for legal plurality. Following this lead, I study the normative and jurisdictional tension between the Catholic church and the young Peruvian republic (1821-1852). For this endeavor, I will first identify the impact of the liberal worldview and law on the traditional normative framework that structured the life of nuns since colonial times. Here I document how monjas cimarronas displayed liberal law to challenge Church law, free themselves from their perpetual vows, overcome their civil death, and start a secularized life. Second, I will trace the active legal subjectivity and the human dramas experienced by the nuns that took to heart the ideal of enlightened freedom (libertad ilustrada). In the end, I will show how their entanglements with the ecclesiastical and civil authorities unfolded within a complex normative and jurisdictional multiverse that shaped the legal, political and cultural configuration of the new polity.

  • Selected Publications

    Guevara Gil, Armando: Multinormatividad y pluralismo legal: vasos comunicantes, in: Samuel Barbosa y Osvaldo Barreneche (Ed.): Multinormatividade e Pluralismo Jurídico em debate: notas para discussão, Sao Paulo, (in preparation) 2024.

    Guevara Gil, Armando: Monist or Pluralist Legal Tradition in 19th-Century Peru?, in: Peter Collin and Agustín Casagrande (Ed.): Law and Diversity, Frankfurt, 2023, 177-207.

    Guevara Gil, Armando, Las penas de la monja Dominga Gutiérrez (Arequipa, Perú, 1831), in: Rolle, Claudio/ Gaune, Rafael (Ed.), Homo Dolens. Cartografías del dolor: sentidos, experiencias, registros, Santiago de Chile: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2018, 107-133.

    Guevara Gil, Armando/Boelens Rutgerd/Getches, David Harding (Ed.) , Out of the Mainstream. Water Rights, Politics and Identity, London: Routledge 2010.

    Guevara Gil, Armando, Diversidad y complejidad legal. Aproximaciones a la Antropología e Historia del Derecho, Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2009.

    Guevara Gil, Armando/Puente Brunke, José de la (Ed.), Derecho, instituciones y procesos históricos, Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2008.

    Guevara Gil, Armando, Propiedad agraria y Derecho colonial: los documentos de la hacienda Santotis (1543-1822), Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1993.