Intimate Enemies. Kimberly Theidon
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of their etiology. Teodoro wanted to see what others sorts of magic I might work. Was I truly powerful or simply a gringa with miski yaku, some pills, and a very large dog? The Senderistas had made pacts with the apus—did I have some sort of relationship with them as well?
But I did not have palabras íntimas that would cause the apus to recognize me. I can still see that big smile on Teodoro Huanaco’s face when I told him I was both ignorant and powerless: he was delighted.
So in the midst of such painful and dangerous times, why should people speak at all? What is the researcher’s responsibility in light of how much is at stake? If I wanted to stay, I had to take a stand and make it explicit. I had to demonstrate that I would put the knowledge shared with me to good use or get out.
Obviously I am not the first anthropologist to note the implausibility of neutrality in the face of struggle.36 However, I am not simply noting the need to take a position as an ethical imperative; rather, I am arguing that one’s presence, one’s speech, elide neutrality. We are, to paraphrase Favret-Saada, already caught. Conducting fieldwork during times of armed conflict requires tremendous time—people will not speak with you if you arrive asking. Additionally, one simply cannot observe. You will not be permitted to if you ever intend to open your mouth. There will come a point when you must take a stand. People will remind you that you are far too implicated not to, just as they reminded me.
One morning I was called out of my room by gunshots and shouting. A crowd had gathered outside the calabozo—the room the ronderos (peasant patrollers) used to lock up prisoners overnight. I made my way through the crowd and found soldiers using their rifles to push away the women who were attempting to shove past them into the calabozo. I saw mama Juliana and mama Sosima, shouting at the soldiers. As I made my way to Juliana, I learned that her partner, Esteban, was one of the young men locked inside. La leva had made its way to Carhuahurán—the illegal forced “recruitment” by the army of young and primarily undocumented men. However, “men” seemed a euphemism for the adolescent boys locked inside. Juliana was distraught: Although several years her junior, Esteban was a good partner for her, bringing bright pink plastic shoes to her little daughter Shintaca. He was a kind stepfather and a hard worker. Juliana was not going to allow these soldiers to take him away. The mothers of the other two young men were also protesting, and before too long the women were grabbing the soldiers’ rifles and attempting to pull them out of their hands.
People knew I had a camera and told me to run and get it. Villagers began exhorting me to take pictures of the soldiers as they struggled with the women. I began shoving my camera up close and photographing their faces. I joined in the shouting and the grabbing. The soldiers began to back down: being photographed shoving unarmed women around with their rifles may have disturbed them. The mayor came down and in front of the soldiers agreed that I should take the photos to the Defensoría del Pueblo and show them what had happened. Mayor Rimachi and the women succeeded in freeing the young men—the women simply refused to back down.
I had previously been hesitant in my dealings with the soldiers, always conscious that my actions might have unintended consequences for the villages in which I lived and worked. Although an airplane could deliver me to safety, for villagers flight would not be airborne. However, in this situation, there was only one thing to do. Had I not stood side by side with the women as they grabbed those rifles out of the soldiers’ hands, who would I have been in that context when the soldiers moved on? I had spent many evenings around small cooking fires and blackened pots, listening to how the soldiers had treated the women and young girls when the military base was fully operational and positioned on the slope overlooking the village. The panopticon had brought daily life under the power of its gaze. I had heard the stories; I could choose a side or have one chosen for me.
I did indeed meet with the Defensor del Pueblo en Huamanga, as well as with the director of the Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CONADEH) in Lima. These groups knew that la leva continued despite official denial of the practice. Photos provided some proof, and the events of that day could become something more than just the routine abuse of rural villagers in the countryside. The women had made the difference; the photos were testimony to that.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes has asked, “What makes anthropology and anthropologists exempt from human responsibility to take an ethical (and even a political) stand on the working out of historical events as we are privileged to witness them?”37 She discerns between the anthropologist as witness and the anthropologist as spectator, and I agree with her insistence on our role as committed witnesses. To merely watch is to reduce the sensuous world and high stakes of events such as this to spectacle—the optic of the distant observer for whom the world is an intellectual project rather than a world in which one is engaged.
However uneasily, I have tried to work as an advocate. I have used my research to argue for where new schools should be built and where bilingual education programs could make a critical difference. I have listened to villagers’ criticisms of the NGOs and their endless surveys and workshops; I’ve suggested to the NGOs what “participation” might look like—distinct from the “top-down participation” that can amount to no more than a restructuring of control.38 Whenever possible, I provided communal authorities with copies of the reports and recommendations that NGOs produced so people could have some sense of what had been promised versus what was delivered. Finally, I have used my ongoing research on sexual violence and reparations to argue for a greater measure of justice for women in the aftermath of war. “On the ground” these issues pull the anthropologist in many directions. The ethnographic particulars of the situation challenge one’s intellectual paradigms, theoretical constructs, the ground on which one stands. I trust we will always be challenged.
* * *
A note about the chapters that follow. There is no conventional chronology, no “telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary.”39 My beads are unstrung, and that is most faithful to the way I experienced my research. This was not a simple story to follow. It was full of switchbacks, dead ends, detours, bodies found and lost, whispers, outright lies, and silences. Think of concentric circles that ripple out from those deceptively simple questions that compelled me back to Peru.
We begin with some cross-cutting themes to establish a shared vocabulary, if you will. We look at the social ills people associate with the war and how they attempted to soothe these wounds of the body and soul. We then consider two iconic figures, The Rape Victim and The War Widow, to unsettle some commonsense notions about gender and armed conflict. Then we move from the northern communities to the central-south, exploring the complex local dynamics of making enemies, learning to kill, and the efforts people have made to reconstruct social life amid intimate enemies.
Chapter 2
Sensuous Psychologies
VÍCTOR RIVERA WAS one of the people who came into the TRC office in Ayacucho each weekday, took his place in a row of cubicles, stretched the large black earphones over his head, and listened hour after hour to some of those 16,917 testimonies. The relatores performed several tasks in the broader scheme of data management. They translated the testimonies from Quechua into Spanish, summarizing what they heard into two- to three-page relatos, and introduced chronology and coding. This was emotionally difficult work. Testimonies given to a truth commission do not make for easy listening.
I interviewed eleven relatores about the training they had received. They explained the challenges they had initially faced when listening to emotional, rambling testimonies. As Víctor recalled, “I had a lot of trouble at first because I was accustomed to transcribing what I heard, just literally transcribing what people said in a disorderly way. They told stories—they wound around. But in the training we learned how to construct a chronological sequence: Antecedents, Facts, Actions Taken, Sequelae, and Expectations for the Future. I got so behind at first because it was hard to learn the sequence. Besides, I listened to drastic things, I’d be crying. The sadness of the testimonies was contagious.”
In addition to introducing linearity into the relatos, the relatores were responsible for an initial coding process, and one task involved