Introduction

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-4337(2011)0000055004
• Published date: 30 June 2011
• Pages: 3-17
• Date: 30 June 2011
• Author: Kathleen M. Sullivan,Sandra Brunnegger

INTRODUCTION

Kathleen M. Sullivan and Sandra Brunnegger

This symposium explores current and emerging relations between states and

indigenous peoples in Latin America. These relationships are being

hammered out within a proliferating constellation of rights discourses –

including indigenous rights, environmental rights, economic rights, cultural

rights, language rights, and human rights, and shaped through empirical

encounters between specif‌ic groups of indigenous peoples and states, and

through the participation of indigenous peoples in international as well as

state institutions. The symposium authors address a number of signif‌icant

aspects of this contemporary f‌ield of changing discourses and practices,

including the ‘‘vernacularization’’ (Merry, 1992, 2006a) of rights, the role of

international legal instruments and institutions, notions of autonomy and

collectivity, which are rooted in colonial and postcolonial histories of power

and resistance.

The symposium begins with the papers that foreground the practices of

indigenous peoples. Contesse opens the symposium by examining the

national context for the struggle over indigenous rights in Chile, in light of

international legal instruments, especially ILO Convention 169, which was

only recently ratif‌ied there. Sieder and Brunnegger each provide different

examples of the ways in which indigenous leaders are working to establish

and maintain indigenous legal systems within the context of state systems of

rule of law and courts in Guatemala and Colombia, respectively. Although

both authors approach state–indigenous relations from the perspective of

indigenous communities concerned about establishing their own indigenous

judicial systems, each addresses a different social register of practices and

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 55, 3–17

Copyright r2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1108/S1059-4337(2011)0000055004

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