It is the overwhelming sentience of violence that stands out in my conversations with survivors of war. Survivors’ testimonies are punctuated with syllables imitating the bombs that fell and the whipping wind of the army helicopters. Many people insisted they had cried until they had lost their vision—insisted bodies that carry so much sadness are bodies that ache and age before their time.
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Byron Good has argued that one contribution anthropology offers to the study of psychopathology is a focus on phenomenological reality—the categories of experience associated with a particular phenomenon rather than symptom criteria presumed to reflect universal biological categories.33 Entering into the realm of meaning and experience allows us to grasp different understandings of etiology, as well as how health and illness are socially and historically produced. Thus we can move beyond stale debates regarding universality versus cultural specificity, combining an interest in human nature with a commitment to investigating human conditions.
Drawing upon phenomenology, Thomas Csordas has suggested “embodiment” as a methodological approach in which bodily experience is understood as the existential basis of culture and of the self.34 Embodiment begins with the assumption that all human experience is intrinsically embodied social experience, which involves a mode of presence and engagement in the world. From this perspective, the body in its various cultural configurations is used as a means of expressing emotions and states of being; what varies is how one learns both to be and to have a body as a member of any given culture.
I combine these approaches with one other: local biologies. Biology is in part a system of signs and meanings, subject to cultural transformation. For instance, Margaret Lock researched menopause in Japan and found that the end of menstruation was significantly different from what is frequently considered universal or “natural.” For Japanese women, menopause was not accompanied by the array of symptoms and medicalized responses that characterize the experiences of menopausal women in Canada and the United States. Lock combines her ethnographic research with epidemiological studies of differences in the distribution of heart disease, osteoporosis, and breast cancer in Japan and in the West, leading her to insist that “local biologies” are at work.35 These theoretical tools allow us to explore how a recent history of violence is embodied and expressed. There are local biologies of poverty, rage, fear, grief—and an array of responses that underscore the close ties between mental health, the administration of justice, and the micropolitics of reconciliation.
Local biologies mean that bodies are historical processes and historical sites. Memories sediment not only in the burned-out houses and churches that dotted the landscape when I began my work in Ayacucho but also in the bodies of the people with whom I have lived.36 As Paul Stoller insists, “the sentient body is culturally consumed by a world of forces, smells, textures, visions, sounds and flavors that unchain, all of them, cultural memories.”37 Violent experiences leave embodied traces. These traces persist in the stiffness of a neck, the burning of nerves, or the aching of a womb.
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It was midday when Dionisia came to my room, the folds of her skirts wrapped tightly in her hands. She called my name from the doorway and I looked up to see her unfolding the embroidered top layer to reveal two eggs her hens had laid earlier that morning. Dionisia’s chickens had somehow survived the long presence of the military base that had occupied the hill overlooking Carhuahurán. When at first I had asked people why there were so few chickens in the village, they looked puzzled by a question with so obvious a response: “We don’t have chickens. We have soldiers.” What initially sounded like a non sequitur in fact conveyed much about civil-military relations during Peru’s internal armed conflict.
I thanked her for the eggs, aware that any protein-rich food was scarce. I offered her a cup of miski yaku. I loved Dionisia. She was a storyteller, a self-proclaimed bocona y reclamona—a “big mouth” who was quite ready to voice her opinion but always with great humor. She had a crinkle-eyed laugh that made both her dangling earrings and me rock back and forth. When I was still a newcomer to the village and a source of tremendous concern and distrust, Dionisia was one of the first women to visit me. It was Dionisia who had convinced the other women that the large sack I carried with me when I went in search of kindling was not used to smuggle out their children in the depth of a moonless night.
She had come to get me so that we could walk down the mountain to her house, lay out in the sun, and talk. “Today I want to tell you about my son,” she said. My research assistant Madeleine and I gathered up a few of our things and we headed down to the patch of sun that fell behind her kitchen. She went into her house to grab some blankets and began shaking them out and placing them on the ground. Dionisia began to unwind her chumbi, the long woven belt that women use to wrap layers of skirts around their waists. I opened my bag and took out the massage lotion I used when talking with Dionisia. As with several other women, when the conversation turned to sadness and loss I would massage them, directing my hands to the part of their body that ached with the telling. I prepared to rub her lower back as I usually did, but she stopped me. “No, today I want to talk about my son who was killed.” She rolled onto her side and placed my hands on her abdomen: “This is where I hurt.”
I began to rub her gently, struck by the contrast between her wiry legs and back and the soft flesh of her stomach. Dionisia had given birth eight times and miscarried on three other occasions. Her soft stomach seemed so vulnerable beneath my hands. We had spoken many times, muscular back stretched out in the warmth of the sun. But today was different.
Teodoro had been her favorite son, the one named after her father, the one who brought her sweet mandarins from the jungle each time he returned from working on the coca plantations. Her eyes began to glisten, and she shook her head: “Better to have been a rock all of those years, better never to have felt anything.” Teodoro had left one last time for the jungle and had never returned. The Shining Path guerrillas had killed him with a crushing blow to his head. “They killed people like that, just smashed their heads as though they were frogs.” The glistening turned to tears, and her stomach began to heave beneath my hands. Dionisia had not been able to bring his body back for burial, but friends told her how he had died and how they had buried him as best they could so far from home.
I was also crying as we lay in the sun. Dionisia kept speaking, her face wet with tears. She told me that she had cried for so long that some of the other women in the village had told her, “Mama Dionisia, if you don’t stop crying you will lose your sight. If you cry too much you’ll go blind.” So they prepared herbs for her and had her drink them everyday. But her tears did not subside.
The women continued to worry about her, and they insisted she must try to stop crying and cleanse her body of llakis. Llakis had been known to drive people mad. The women led her to the river where they caught the water as it ran downstream. Pouring the water into a mortar and pestle, they ground it several times and had her drink. But the llakis continued to make her body ache, and her pensamientos (thoughts) refused to stop. Her head throbbed as the pensamientos opened the nerves in the nape of her neck.
Finally one of the older women came to visit her and told Dionisia what she must do. She was to search her entire house and gather up every shred of her son’s clothing, place it in a large burlap sack, tie it tight with rope, and walk it out behind her house. Then she would be able to forget, and her tears would finally subside.
“So I went through every bit of my house, and I gathered up everything,” she said, “even the shreds of his clothes that I found hanging from the rafter above my bed. I found a large sack, put all of his clothing in it, tied it up tight, and carried the sack out to behind my corral—that’s even farther than behind my house.” She fell silent. My hands stopped—my entire body paused to listen. By now her stomach was heaving even harder, and Madeleine and I were crying as well. Finally I asked, “So, mama Dionisia, did it help?” Her tears
