Bucerius Law SchoolFocusing on recent experiences in Mexico and Ecuador, the articles presented in this dossier explore key aspects of the complexities involved in efforts to legalize indigenous rights and claims. For over four decades, indigenous people's social and political movements have mobilized for autonomy rights on the basis of cultural distinctiveness, while at the same time time demanding access to public goods and rights to which all citizens of their states are entitled. Yet since the mid-1980s the translation of these demands into law has to a large extent framed relations between indigenous peoples and the state. In her seminal article in 1995, Jean Jackson discussed the ways in which indigenous groups in the Amazon region of Colombia were "learning to change their notions of their own history and culture in order to achieve a better fit with received wisdom about Indianness" (1995:3), in this case received wisdom shaped by "change agents," including indigenous social movements, government agencies, NGOs, religious missionaries, and anthropologists. While such actors, of course, continue to shape perceptions and practices of "culture" in multiple specific contexts, today the dominant encoding of the "received wisdom about Indianness" occurs primarily through law. In this introductory essay, we map out the origins of this turn to legalization and argue that this multiple and de-centered-or legally plural-process has today entered a new phase associated with the exhaustion of the neoliberal multicultural model that dominated much of the region in the 1990s and 2000s. The current period,

The gender participatory turn in the Andes has been accompanied by multicultural and plurinational citizenship regimes granting greater autonomy for indigenous self-governance and recognition of legal pluralism. While autonomy regimes have been criticized for legalizing gender discrimination in customary systems, this chapter emphasizes the diverse strategies deployed by indigenous women to improve their participation and secure greater gender justice within communal governance regimes—systems they defend as more accessible than state institutions. In some cases positive synergies have developed between the parity movement and indigenous women’s struggles for voice. In other cases, the absence of cross-class alliances, racism, and party political calculations and interests have impeded the development of a transformative agenda for advancing women’s interests. Evidence from the Andes suggests that strategies of claiming voice and greater participation within indigenous governance systems are complementary to national approaches for advancing gender equality, not in conflict with them.