Indigenous people and the western tolerance: Human Rights as a sublimated form of assimilation

Abstract

Despite the cultural specificity of its origins and the vagueness of its foundations, human rights have been instituted as the frame where the relations between indigenous people and western societies must take place. But, in the construction of a multicultural state which aims to achieve ethnocultural justice, this can do more harm than good. In this essay, I will analyze in which way human rights can turn into an ideological pretext that allows the completion of the colonization of indigenous peoples, by considering its effects in the aymara administration of the hydric resource. At the same time, I will try to elucidate fairer boundaries for the manifestation of indigenous traditions, by a normative mediation of the western decision.