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 translating Quechua speakers’ ailments into biomedical categories. Sandra, who worked on the relatos in addition to collecting testimonies, recounted the training she had received from the team that arrived from Lima: “The trainers told us that campesinos are very imaginative, and they would tell us all sorts of fabulous things. We were warned not to fall for all of that. Susto [soul loss due to fright], llakis [painful memories that fill the body and torment the soul], irritation of the heart—they told us those things were inconceivable. They don’t exist.”
I was baffled. “So what were you told to do when you were working on the relatos?”
“Well, they asked us to describe some of the symptoms—fearful, loss of appetite, painful memories. They said some things could be malnutrition, but most of it was trauma. They told us that people were suffering from trauma.”
“So in the relatos, you categorized these ailments as trauma?”
Sandra nodded. “Yeah, these problems were coded as trauma [estar traumado].”
Coding for Trauma
Among neighbors, among family members—we killed each other here. Jesúcristo, even now I still don’t understand.
—Moises, Tiquihua, 2003
The violence in Peru frequently involved people who lived in the same social worlds and knew each other well—or at least thought they did. In many communities, these same people find themselves forced to share spaces that were recently scenes of intimate, lethal violence. When a woman continues to live across the street from her rapist, or a son crosses paths each week at the market with the men who murdered his father, what does it mean to work on mental health? How can we best understand and respond to the psychological aftermath of war?
The discourse of trauma—and the psychiatric diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—plays a prominent role in postconflict and humanitarian conceptions of suffering. This diagnosis was first included in the American catalogue of psychiatric disorders in 1980 with specific reference to Vietnam-era American war veterans. Over the past three decades the range of application of this diagnosis has expanded dramatically, and concepts of traumatic memory have become the dominant framework for medical engagement with social suffering both domestically and internationally.1 There is an enormous market for trauma and an industry of trauma experts deployed to postwar countries to detect symptoms of PTSD via the use of “culturally sensitive” questionnaires. In the process of globalizing the discourse of trauma through humanitarian and postconflict interventions, the trauma narrative itself has become increasingly normative, making it difficult to think otherwise about violent events and their legacies. From Holocaust survivors to U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, from battered women in Latin America to child soldiers in the Congo and survivors of rape in the Balkans, mainstream trauma theories beguile with their alleged capacity to encompass vastly divergent experiences fraught with etiological and moral complexity.2
Parallel with the growth of the trauma industry, however, has been a debate regarding the diagnostic category PTSD and its underlying assumptions. The literature questioning the utility of PTSD in “non-Western” or nonclinical settings—for example, in postwar contexts—is abundant, and I will not rehearse a well-worn series of debates.3 There is, however, a gap between academic critique and the “on the ground” world in which battles are waged over funding priorities, service design, and delivery. When I worked with the PTRC in Ayacucho, it became clear that nongovernmental organizations would be jockeying for position to work on mental health, with mental health concerns frequently reduced to “trauma.” A scant three years later, many people would accuse those same NGOs of “trafficking with the blood and the pain of the people” in their efforts to secure funding during the “mental health boom.”4
A caveat. One hackneyed anthropological move is to speak “our” cultural relativism to “their” (read: psychiatry’s)
