on the need to listen to the life histories of these former militants to understand their complex motivations for waging war, I do not lose sight of those who feel deeply aggrieved by “those people” (huk kuna, referring to the former militants). Daily conversations resonated with local moral idioms—detailed discussions of responsibility, degrees of guilt, and processes of redress. This is “justice talk” in another register, likely to involve references to aching hearts, lacerating ulcers, masks, faces and foreheads held shamelessly high. Local moral discourse is embodied, leading me to think in terms of a phenomenology of justice and injustice, as well as the complicated alchemy of remembering and forgetting that characterizes postwar social worlds. This local moral idiom is one of condemnation and transformation and provides great insight into how people conceptualize their elusive search for justice.
Terror’s Talk: Some Notes on Fieldwork, Witches, and War
What is involved in conducting research on political violence? We ask people to speak about life and death, about pain and how it etches the heart. If and when they decide to speak with us, there is no turning back without also turning away. To paraphrase Stanley Cavell, “The utterance ‘I am in pain’ is my acknowledgment of pain,” and it is our research participant’s claim upon us. We are “forced to respond, either to acknowledge it in return or to avoid it,” and any sort of shared future between the narrator and her listener is at stake.29 In that encounter, the possibility of distance and impartiality must be surrendered.
Frankly, there is no “observation” when people are at war and you arrive asking them about it. You are, whether you wish to be or not, a participant. When terror weaves its way through a community, words are no longer mere information. Words become weapons and posing a question must mean you plan to do something with the response. How does one conduct fieldwork amid terror’s talk?
* * *
It was 1997 and I had been in the village of Carhuahurán for a few weeks when I finally met Michael, the commando of Los Tigres—a special self-defense unit that was paid to stand watch each night. I was interested in why the villagers had added this additional unit and expense to the preexisting ronda campesina (armed peasant patrol). I approached Michael with my hand extended, commenting on how happy I was to meet him and eager to talk with him. His feet shifted into a broad stance, his rifle was hoisted more firmly over his shoulder, and he looked me straight in the eyes: “Why do you want to talk to me?”
I began to explain, feeling more nervous with each awkward word that came out of my mouth. I had been introduced by the village president at a general assembly sometime before—certainly he remembered? I tried to explain my research and why I was there. I told him I was interested in the history of the villages, how they had lived during the years of the war, and how they were now rebuilding their communities. He gave me a quizzical look. Finally I felt rescued by a group of small children who approached—I noted how adorable the girls’ hats were, rimmed with flowers and ribbons. I made “small talk,” not understanding just how oxymoronic the term would be.
That evening in my room, I began mulling over what was happening. My experience with Michael was not unique. When I first arrived, many people invented names for themselves when we met. My earliest field notes are peopled by a phantom cast of pseudonyms. As I would learn, for years the guerrillas had arrived in the village with lists of names. The list was read, those villagers would be separated out, and there would be a juicio popular (people’s trial) followed by the execution of everyone whose name appeared on the list. The soldiers also arrived with their lists of supposed Senderista sympathizers; many of those named were arrested, killed, or disappeared. Giving one’s name was to place oneself at risk.
But it was not just war that made naming so powerful. Added to the political violence are long-standing practices of hechicería—witchcraft. These traditional practices are mobilized at times to new uses, as concerns about suspicious alliances during the war give rise to concerns about wrongdoing and revenge in the present.
A key figure in diagnosing witchcraft and settling accounts in Carhuahurán is don Teofilo, the curandero (healer). Teofilo is a tiny man—indeed, his nickname is El Piki (Quechua for “flea”). Teofilo is called upon to read the coca leaves and bodily symptoms; to name a perpetrator when witchcraft is determined; and to head out to the mountains and speak with the apus—the mountain gods who were angry that the villagers forgot them during the years of war, causing the gods to ally with the Senderistas.
Teofilo was wary of me when I first arrived, wondering what this gringa was going to do with all she learned. During one of our initial conversations, Teofilo issued a thinly veiled challenge: “So you want to know what I do? The words I use are so powerful that I could destroy you just by speaking them. Do you want me to speak them right now? Do you really think you have the power to handle my words?” He began to laugh, clearly pleased by my discomfiture. I felt very small indeed. He was, after all, the man who knew the language that allowed him to climb the sharp peaks surrounding Carhuahurán and converse with the mountain gods, soliciting advice and appeasing their anger.
The methodological challenges of conducting research during war go far beyond the routine concerns of establishing trust. Over the years, I was told of killing suffered and killing done. I knew who the ex-guerrillas were and why they had been allowed back in, their secret kept from the soldiers at the base. I knew what had happened to don Mario Quispe, the village president who demanded that the soldiers stop abusing the women—his body was never found; his widow went mad with grief. And there, in the freezing puna, I thought about Jeanne Favret-Saada and the French peasants with whom she had worked.
In her book Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage, Favret-Saada sets off to study witchcraft in the provinces of France. As she writes, “In the project for my research I wrote that I wanted to study witchcraft practices. For more than a century, folklorists had been gorging themselves on them, and the time had come to understand them. In the field, however, all I came across was language. For many months, the only empirical facts I was able to record were words.”30 As she comes to realize, “witchcraft is spoken words; but these spoken words are power, and not knowledge or information…. In short, there is no neutral position with spoken words: in witchcraft, words wage war.”31 And in war, words trigger terror. Rumor about who was seen where and doing what becomes a matter of life and death.
I reflected on her assertion that language is an act—the word is an act. Ethnographers frequently rely upon the spoken word as conveying information; however, witchcraft is spoken words as action. Informing the ethnographer for the sake of knowing is a contrary idea because a word can fix a fate and whoever puts herself in a position to utter the words is formidable. Knowledge is not neutral, and insisting that one is simply there to “study” keeps people guessing what purpose lies behind wanting to know.
The parallels were striking. Both witchcraft and war involve social relationships that are tense, dangerous, occult, violent, and potentially lethal. Again, there is no neutral place from which to ask, “What happened here? Tell me a bit about the war.” By merely speaking, I had entered into terror’s talk.
Mass violence provokes a recalibration of perceptual and moral frameworks. This world of altered perceptions and ruptured symbolic systems has been described as the “space of death.”32 In this space of death the signified and signifier come unhinged—the structuralist dream of a chainlink fence of order is disrupted, and the surplus meaning unleashed gives rise to tremendous portent. Everything becomes what it is and yet something more. The wind rustling through the laminated steel roofs of rural houses presages an imminent Senderista attack. A hollow in the mountain signals the opening in which the guerrillas slip out of view and disappear into the earth itself. Villagers assured me that it took the security forces so long to capture Abimael Guzmán because he could transform himself into a rock, a tree, a spring—and the soldiers had only thought to search for
