in assembling a list of sundry illness categories, pinned to the page like so many colorful butterfly wings. Rather, my aims are twofold. First, I want to question an enduring juxtaposition and its consequences: some people and groups have “theory” and others have “beliefs”; some people and groups export categories of knowledge, while others remain resolutely “culture bound.” One problem with the increasingly normative trauma discourse and models such as PTSD is their pretentious scope, reducing other theories (generally called “beliefs and customs”) to little more than local deviations of a universal truth. From this perspective, there would be little or nothing to learn from the sophisticated theories Quechua speakers have elaborated about violence and its effects, about social life and their struggle to rebuild it.
Second, I want to investigate the social and moral implications of framing violence and its legacies in terms of trauma.6 I am troubled less by the relativist concern with the imposition of “Western categories” and more by what the discourse of trauma allows people to say and do. Approaching these topics in terms of the “West and the rest” is not useful, descriptively or analytically.7 “Western categories” elide the complex ways in which people engage with global institutions and obscure how place-based engagements with these institutions involve complex, unpredictable negotiations and outcomes. Rather than assuming a “traumatized” population that homogenizes victims and perpetrators into a morally elastic category, there are more interesting and complicated stories to tell. These stories might, in turn, teach us a great deal about the individual and collective consequences of lethal, intimate violence and what is involved in reconstructing both people and place in the aftermath of war.
In this chapter and the next, I explore the discourse of trauma and how it moves in local social and political fields.8 Trauma is, in part, a technology of commensuration designed to yield scientifically authorized categories of harm across vastly divergent lifeworlds. I discuss the implications of the PTRC’s coding process and what was lost in translation. I then move on to the theories Quechua speakers have about health, illness, and healing, exploring the crucial links between the body and memory, between emotions and illness, between ethnopsychological concepts of the human and what these reveal about processes of punishment, atonement, and, at times, redemption.
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I was proud to work with the Peruvian TRC, and their Final Report is rigorous and politically important. However, certain methodological aspects troubled me. “Coding for trauma” was one of them. How can interventions help people rebuild their lives without understanding locally salient theories of illness, health, agency, and social repair? How do we respond to the needs of survivors of war without understanding the local forms and logics of social ties and their transformation? Without understanding what makes a being human, and to whom that status is conferred or denied?
In his analysis of the data coding process employed by the South African TRC, Richard Wilson found that the desire to create legally defensible findings led to the development of an elaborate classification scheme that broke each testimony down into a series of forty-eight categories of violation. Wilson argues that “The integrity of the narrative at the data processing stage was destroyed as processors deconstructed the single narrative and ‘captured’ discrete acts and the details of victims, witnesses and perpetrators.”9 The creation of legally defensible findings thus came at the expense of victims’ experience of telling their stories, which in turn led to the “Final Report [being] little more than a chronicle of wrong acts.”10
Although the PTRC’s Final Report moves far beyond a mere chronicle of human rights violations, I share Wilson’s concerns about the systematic distortions involved in converting testimonies into evidence. Truth commissions are aware they are producing final reports for various audiences. One audience is the “international community,” and this is an incentive to employ key diacritics of veracity: linear chronologies, tables and charts, quantifiable violations, dates, times—and trauma. As a technology of commensuration, the discourse of trauma is globally recognized and can “authorize the real.”11 Thus locally salient categories of affliction, which may reference radically different understandings of etiology, are coded as trauma. This entails important semantic shifts. It also simplifies complex moral and political situations.12
In the section of the PTRC’s Final Report titled “Psychosocial Sequelae,” the authors state that allusions to being traumatized are abundant in the testimonies, with trauma understood as a state of confusion or disorientation as a result of the violence.13 They acknowledge that Quechua speakers learned the term as a result of NGO interventions. My point is that people were also “traumatized” as a result of the data coding process.
I had several meetings with the PTRC’s mental health team in Lima, and our first conversation was a jolt. I presented some preliminary findings, outlining various memory afflictions, llakis, susto, irritation of the heart, la teta asustada (the frightened breast). At the end of my talk, there was awkward silence. I wondered what had gone awry. Someone finally explained the initial silence: with the exception of susto, this team of seasoned and committed mental health professionals had never heard of these ailments. As one person remarked, “It’s as though you were talking about another world.” What had happened?
As we talked, the reason became clear. The mental health team was analyzing the relatos, understandable given the number of testimonies and the time constraints. In the relatos people were “traumatized,” and thus the various afflictions I discussed were absent. To their credit the mental health team attempted to rectify this problem. Midway through the TRC process, they obtained funds to have a sample of 401 testimonies transcribed in Quechua and subsequently translated into Spanish in an effort to capture what people had actually said they suffered from. This sample, however, was still limited because the interviews had not been designed to explicitly explore the theme of mental health; rather, the interview guide was aimed at collecting facts about the human rights violations people reported.14
Truth commissions have pedagogical objectives. One didactic goal is to educate both domestic and international audiences about a violent past as a means of ensuring nonrepetition: in this case, memory is understood to exercise a deterrent effect. Individual testimonies provide the raw “memory material” that is processed and from which a collective narrative is forged. In an effort to produce “intelligible results,” there is a move to technologies of commensuration. This may include the standardized software program used to analyze data, the teams of international experts who move from country to country to provide technical assistance, as well as the discourse of trauma itself. These strategies are part of the globalized transitional justice industry and are marshaled in the interest of producing findings that are defensible and that allow a final report “to speak” beyond the context in which it was produced. For the PTRC, it allowed the Final Report to translate “inconceivable things” into science and thereby authorize the suffering and the text.
These are worthy goals. However, I cannot shake off some doubts. When first thinking through this material, it was tempting to assert that the discourse of trauma involves the systematic erasure of local meaning. While this is true for the relatos and the coding process, trauma circulated in other spheres in other ways. Although being “traumado” was introduced into these communities by external agents, over the years I did hear some Quechua speakers use the term. “Estar traumado” became part of local dynamics as people mobilized the category to different ends.15
Talking Trauma … and Other Modern Things
When I started my work in Peru, I visited various NGOs to introduce myself and learn more about their programs. From the director of an NGO in Lima, I received my first lecture on “how they do not suffer.” I explained to the director that I was going to work in Ayacucho on the impact of political violence in campesino communities, and he responded in a tone reserved for children and gringos: “Señorita, what you
