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Global Discourses on the Local Terrain: Human Rights and Indigenous Identity in Chiapas

University of Notre Dame, USA

As discourses of human and cultural rights have become increasingly globalized, indigenous groups have progressively adopted them in their struggles for greater legal recognition within the state and/or autonomy from state control. The formulation of their rights claims in terms of cultural identities - i.e. 'indigenous rights' - has strategic value for promoting their goals in the context of the globalization of human rights, but how such formulations are understood by local actors, as well as the effects these formulations have on social and cultural norms in local contexts, is perhaps less clear. This article considers how local understandings and identities are shaped by engagement with the networks of actors and legal regimes associated with cultural rights. The Chiapas case suggests that there are simultaneous and contradictory processes of cultural homogenization and the generation of increased cultural diversity at work in this engagement, and also raises some questions generated by the inherent definitional contradictions regarding what constitutes Indianness globally, nationally, and locally.

Key Words: Chiapas • cultural rights • human rights • indigenous identity

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