Anthropology as a Humanitarian Action in Peru: Violent Death and Deathscapes Out of Place

Abstract

Anthropology has traditionally studied the origin and processes of violence worldwide. Violent death has been one of the manifestations of these processes, where the violated body contains a strong load of meanings when they are not culturally catered to. A type of applied anthropology linked to the forensic context, human rights, and humanitarian action has been contributing to the direct documentation of millions of bloody episodes. Peru has not been the exception; after a period of armed violence (1980–2000), there are tens of thousands of people dead, and people reported missing. Today, the aftermath is widely notorious. On the one hand, relatives continue to search for missing loved ones. On the other hand, there are landscapes and rural communities where there are still sites of clandestine deposits of dead bodies and body parts. A cultural, social, and humanitarian breakdown has been faced, where the bad death persists in the social imaginary of the communities, contaminating the cultural landscape of the populations. Forensic anthropology has been able to identify, register, and systematize these deathscapes, which still persist in liminality. New challenges must be conducted to tackle this issue.