Competing Meanings: Negotiating Prior Consultation in Brazil

While international human rights accords increasingly grant a legal basis for indigenous rights to territory and participation, the national processes of interpretation of the legal basis for rights remain a contentious topic. This article discusses International Labour Convention No. 169, which regulates prior consultation of indigenous and tribal peoples. Drawing on material collected during extensive fieldwork from 2012 to 2015, this work provides assessment of the process of creating frames of meaning (Merry 2006) for prior consultation within the Brazilian national context. It is argued that the first step of vernacularizing human rights involves the process of preparing the ground for a legitimate embedding of concepts and rights framed on an international level into national contexts. Understanding the functioning of framing processes in the implementation of human rights sheds light on the mechanisms of power and resistance that take such processes beyond the legal sphere into political arenas of negotiation. [Brazil, human rights, indigenous people, law, vernacularization, prior consultation, ILO Convention 169]