In the aftermath of a civil war, former enemies are left living side by side-and often the enemy is a son-in-law, a godfather, an old schoolmate, or the community that lies just across the valley. ...Though the internal conflict in Peru at the end of the twentieth century was incited and organized by insurgent Senderistas, the violence and destruction were carried out not only by Peruvian armed forces but also by civilians. In the wake of war, any given Peruvian community may consist of ex-Senderistas, current sympathizers, widows, orphans, army veterans-a volatile social landscape. These survivors, though fully aware of the potential danger posed by their neighbors, must nonetheless endeavor to live and labor alongside their intimate enemies. Drawing on years of research with communities in the highlands of Ayacucho, Kimberly Theidon explores how Peruvians are rebuilding both individual lives and collective existence following twenty years of armed conflict.Intimate Enemiesrecounts the stories and dialogues of Peruvian peasants and Theidon's own experiences to encompass the broad and varied range of conciliatory practices: customary law before and after the war, the practice ofarrepentimiento(publicly confessing one's actions and requesting pardon from one's peers), a differentiation between forgiveness and reconciliation, and the importance of storytelling to make sense of the past and recreate moral order. The micropolitics of reconciliation in these communities present an example of postwar coexistence that deeply complicates the way we understand transitional justice, moral sensibilities, and social life in the aftermath of war. Any effort to understand postconflict reconstruction must be attuned to devastation as well as to human tenacity for life.
Hidden in Plain Sight Theidon, Kimberly
Current anthropology,
12/2015, Letnik:
56, Številka:
S12
Journal Article
Recenzirano
During the last decade alone, it is estimated that tens of thousands of children have been born worldwide as a result of wartime rape and sexual exploitation, yet we know very little about these ...living legacies of sexual violence. I complement research in Peru with comparative data to explore four themes. Influenced by the incitement to “break the silence,” the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission actively sought out first-person accounts of rape, understood to be the emblematic womanly wound of war. I analyze what a focus on rape and sexual violence brings into our field of vision and what it may obscure. I turn next to local biologies and theories of transmission. Children conceived of rape face stigma and infanticide in many societies, which in part reflects the theories of transmission that operate in any given social context. Theories of transmission lead to “strategic pregnancies” as women seek to exert some control over their reproductive labor and to identify the father of their child. The effort to determine paternity involves names and naming practices and the patriarchal law of the father. I conclude with questions to assist in making these issues part of the anthropological research agenda.
Truth commissions have become key mechanisms in transitional justice schemes in post conflict societies in order to assure transitions to peace, the rule of law, and respect for human rights. ...However, few studies examine what must happen to ensure that the transition process initiated by a truth commission successfully continues after the commission concludes its truth-gathering work and submits its final report. This article argues that while attention often focuses on prosecutions and institutional reforms, reparations also play a critical role. The authors share their observations of how government agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), civil society sectors and victim-survivor's associations struggle over reparations in post truth commission Peru, offering a preliminary analysis of key theoretical suppositions about transitional justice: they explore whether the act of telling the truth to an official body is something that helps or hinders a victim-survivor in his or her own recovery process, and whether in giving testimonies victim-survivors place particular demands upon the state. The authors conclude that while testimony giving may possibly have temporary cathartic effects, it must be followed by concrete actions. Truth tellers make an implicit contract with their interlocutors to respond through acknowledgment and redress. Oh, why should I remember all of that again? From the top of my head to the bottom of my feet, from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head--I've told what happened here so many times. And for what? Nothing ever changes.
A key component of peace processes and post-conflict reconstruction is the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of ex-combatants. I argue that DDR programs imply multiple transitions: ...from the combatants who lay down their weapons, to the governments that seek an end to armed conflict, to the communities that receive--or reject--these demobilized fighters. At each level, these transitions imply a complex equation between the demands of peace and the clamor for justice. However, traditional approaches to DDR have focused on military and security objectives, which have resulted in these programs being developed in relative isolation from the field of transitional justice and its concerns with historical clarification, justice, reparations, and reconciliation. Drawing upon my research with former combatants in Colombia, I argue that successful reintegration not only requires fusing the processes and goals of DDR programs with transitional justice measures, but that both DDR and transitional justice require a gendered analysis that includes an examination of the salient links between weapons, masculinities, and violence. Constructing certain forms of masculinity is not incidental to militarism: rather, it is essential to its maintenance. What might it mean to "add gender" to DDR and transitional justice processes if one defined gender to include men and masculinities, thus making these forms of identity visible and a focus of research and intervention? I explore how one might "add gender" to the DDR program in Colombia as one step toward successful reintegration, peace-building, and sustainable social change.
War and its aftermath serve as powerful motivators for the elaboration and transmission of individual, communal, and national histories. These histories both reflect and constitute human experience ...by contouring social memory and producing truth effects. These histories use the past in a creative manner, combining and recombining elements of that past that serve to interests in the present. In this sense, the conscious appropriation of history involves both remembering and forgetting-both being dynamic processes permeated with intentionality. This essay explores the political use of the narratives being elaborated in rural villages in the department of Ayacucho regarding the internal war that convulsed Peru for some fifteen years. Each narrative has a political intent and assumes both an internal and external audience. Indeed, the deployment of war narratives has much to do with forging new relations of power, ethnicity, and gender that are integral to the contemporary politics of the region. These new relations impact the construction of democratic practices and the model of citizenship being elaborated in the current context.
Hidden in Plain Sight Theidon, Kimberly
Current anthropology,
12/2015, Letnik:
56, Številka:
S12
Journal Article
Recenzirano
During the last decade alone, it is estimated that tens of thousands of children have been born worldwide as a result of wartime rape and sexual exploitation, yet we know very little about these ...living legacies of sexual violence. I complement research in Peru with comparative data to explore four themes. Influenced by the incitement to “break the silence,” the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission actively sought out first-person accounts of rape, understood to be the emblematic womanly wound of war. I analyze what a focus on rape and sexual violence brings into our field of vision and what it may obscure. I turn next to local biologies and theories of transmission. Children conceived of rape face stigma and infanticide in many societies, which in part reflects the theories of transmission that operate in any given social context. Theories of transmission lead to “strategic pregnancies” as women seek to exert some control over their reproductive labor and to identify the father of their child. The effort to determine paternity involves names and naming practices and the patriarchal law of the father. I conclude with questions to assist in making these issues part of the anthropological research agenda.
This article is one chronicle of a pandemic foretold. The consequences of COVID-19 in the United States were not inevitable, and my goal is to trace the humanly and inhumanely authored trajectory ...this pandemic has taken. Who could be surprised that the burden of morbidity and mortality would follow the color/class/poverty/gender lines that riddle this society? I begin by considering history - specifically the 1918 flu epidemic - and what public health messages from that pandemic reveal about gender, health behavior, and messaging aimed at men who were resistant to barrier methods of flu prevention. I then consider the politics of disposability. How are certain communities made "unimaginable," such that their deaths provoke a presidential "it is what it is"? Disposability and the lack of national grieving invites us to consider the drastic interruption in rituals of mourning, and to investigate Donald Trump for crime against humanity.
La guerre et l’après-guerre sont de puissants modèles pour l’élaboration et la transmission d’histoires individuelles, collectives et nationales. Ces histoires reflètent l’expérience humaine mais ...elles la forment aussi, en traçant les contours de la mémoire collective et en produisant des effets de vérité. Ces histoires utilisent le passé de manière créative, en en combinant et recombinant les éléments au service d’intérêts du présent. Dans ce sens, l’appropriation délibérée de l’histoire implique à la fois mémoire et oubli – tous deux processus dynamiques imprégnés d’intentionnalité. Cet article explore les usages politiques des récits élaborés dans les villages ruraux du département d’Ayacucho au sujet de la guerre civile qui a déchiré le Pérou durant quelque quinze années. Chaque récit a un dessein politique et s’adresse à une audience à la fois interne et externe. En effet, le déploiement des récits de la guerre a beaucoup à voir avec la création de nouveaux rapports de pouvoir, d’ethnicité, de genre qui sont des composantes essentielles des redéfinitions contemporaines du politique dans cette région. Ces nouveaux rapports influencent la construction des pratiques démocratiques et les modèles de citoyenneté élaborés dans le contexte actuel.
This article draws on anthropological research conducted with communities in Ayacucho, the region of Peru that suffered the greatest loss of life during the internal armed conflict of the 1980s and ...1990s. One particularity of internal wars, such as Peru's, is that foreign armies do not wage the attacks: frequently, the enemy is a son-in-law, a godfather, an old schoolmate, or the community that lies just across the valley. The charged social landscape of the present reflects the lasting damage done by a recent past in which people saw just what their neighbors could do. The author contributes to the literature on transitional justice by examining the construction and deconstruction of lethal violence among "intimate enemies" and by analyzing how the concepts and practices of communal justice have permitted the development of a micropolitics of reconciliation in which campesinos administer both retributive and restorative forms of justice.
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