Narrating secret and silence: recent ethnographies on “post-conflict” Ayacucho, Peru

Abstract

Works reviewed: Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes By Gonzalez, Olga (The University of Chicago Press, 2011, 307 pp) Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru By Theidon, Kimberly (The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, 461 pp.). The following review discusses two recently published ethnographies set in aftermath of Peru’s internal armed conflict, 1980–2000, fought primarily between state forces and the Maoist rebel group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). Issues of the ‘‘post-conflict’’ appear to dominate scholarship by historians and social scientists currently studying Peru, and for good reason. The political nature of the armed insurrection and contested understandings of the legitimacy of state violence, in addition to the massive loss of life and displacement of people incurred from these decades of acute, armed conflict must be considered in any scholarship that addresses Peruvian history, culture, or society. Conflict, however, can never be neatly packaged as the past, or bounded between years or decades; the label of ‘‘post-conflict’’ is indeed problematic. This is an issue that has been raised by RojasPerez (2008) and others. To pay due attention to the complications of putting conflict in the past tense is the task of contemporary ethnographers working in Peru. The two books discussed in this review are faced with this challenge, addressing it in different ways, but with a shared attention to the powers of both secret and silence. In Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes (2011), Olga Gonzalez uses innovative methods of photo elicitation to explore the way conflict is narrated, and the sorts of narratives and images of conflict that are imagined to be suitable for public consumption. Through the content, circulation of, and reactions to tablas pintadas, a regional form of narrative painting, Gonzalez argues that the invisible, particularly in the case of internal war, is always written into the visible. Tablas