Indigenous struggles for territorial rights based on traditional practices acquired great importance in Latin America. These historical and political movements led to the emergence of governmental mechanisms within the state, aimed at regulating and guaranteeing a certain recognition of indigenous territoriality. However, the mechanisms put in place to this end by public institutions are rooted in a modern, Western territorial vision, supported and organized by the State. The values and principles mobilized can sometimes come into tension or become contradictory with the traditional thinking of indigenous peoples with regard to the fixity of devices and categories; and in particular the synergy between human-non-human, material-intangible, living-non-living, present in indigenous territorial processes.

Thus, an interaction-dialogue between the state's vision of territory and the indigenous cosmovision of territory takes place within the framework of processes of land formalization in protected and legally recognized indigenous territories. Indeed, these two visions of territory correspond to opposing paradigms from the point of view of ontologies that underpin them, which may result in an acceptance of the domination of the imposed framework or in resistance or opposition, or more likely in a translation of one into the language of the other for strategic purposes but with a certain degree of alteration.