In recent years Latin American indigenous groups have regularly
deployed the discourse of human rights to legitimate their
positions and pursue their goals. Perhaps nowhere is this more
evident than in the Maya region of Chiapas and Guatemala, where in
the last two decades indigenous social movements have been engaged
in ongoing negotiations with the state, and the presence of
multinational actors has brought human rights to increased
prominence. In this volume, scholars and activists examine the role
of human rights in the ways that states relate to their
populations, analyze conceptualizations and appropriations of human
rights by Mayans in specific localities, and explore the
relationship between the individualist and "universal" tenets of
Western-derived concepts of human rights and various Mayan cultural
understandings and political subjectivities.
The collection includes a reflection on the effects of
truth-finding and documenting particular human rights abuses, a
look at how Catholic social teaching validates the human rights
claims advanced by indigenous members of a diocese in Chiapas, and
several analyses of the limitations of human rights frameworks. A
Mayan intellectual seeks to bring Mayan culture into dialogue with
western feminist notions of women's rights, while another
contributor critiques the translation of the United Nations
Declaration of Human Rights into Tzeltal, an indigenous language in
Chiapas. Taken together, the essays reveal a broad array of
rights-related practices and interpretations among the Mayan
population, demonstrating that global-local-state interactions are
complex and diverse even within a geographically limited area. So
too are the goals of indigenous groups, which vary from social
reconstruction and healing following years of violence to the
creation of an indigenous autonomy that challenges the tenets of
neoliberalism.
"Contributors" Robert M. Carmack, Stener Ekern, Christine Kovic,
Xochitl Leyva Solano, Julian Lopez Garcia, Irma Otzoy, Pedro
Pitarch, alvaro Reyes, Victoria Sanford, Rachel Sieder, Shannon
Speed, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, David Stoll, Richard Ashby Wilson
General
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