"Reencountering our ways": A discourse analysis of indigenous women's work for their individual rights within the Mayan systems in Guatemala.

Abstract

Legal pluralism, the co-existence of several legal systems within the same state, exists in most countries in the world. This existence of parallel legal systems can enhance women’s access to justice, for example if these legal institutions are located closer to the women in the rural areas or if the representatives speak the same language as the women. There is however growing indications suggesting that parallel legal systems create obstacles to women’s access to justice and to their rights, like when the parallel systems are based on, for instance, interpretations of religious and cultural principles that are discriminatory towards women. As a response to this, women’s organizations around the world are creating innovative ways to protect and enhance women’s rights. This qualitative study is focused on the way indigenous women work with women’s rights in Latin America. I have examined to what extent it is possible for women to preserve and protect cultural / collective rights at the same time as protecting and improving women's access to their individual rights. The empirical data consists of two books produced by an indigenous women’s organization from Guatemala, the Mujeres Mayas Kaqla, and I have used Norman Faircloughs critical discourse analysis as the method to analyse these books.The results of the analysis showed that the Mujeres Mayas Kaqla manage to combine the preservation and protection of their cultural and collective rights at the same time as they promote their individual rights as women by reformulating and mixing existing discourses in a culturally sensitive manner. They to simultaneously strengthen their Mayan cultures and the position of women within their cultures, and they approach the topics of women’s rights, gender based violence, discriminatory structures, etc, in different ways, for example, by talking of the oppressive structures as something not originally Mayan, but as something their communities have adopted after years of living in an oppressive society. In their work, they refrain from using “Western” concepts, and instead use Mayan concepts, when talking of human rights issue, showing that they do not have to conform to the existing human rights language and discourse, but instead translate it to fit into the relevant, local context.