LITMIR.BIZ

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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 a man. Events, sounds, images—these become signs that are read for the warnings they offer or the evil they index.

      The surplus of meaning also gives rise to duplicity and doubling. Villagers learned that survival might well depend on showing one face to the soldiers and another to the guerrillas. People lived their public and secret lives, masking their torn allegiances. Many people insisted that everyone became “two-faced” (iskay uyukuna), and one could never know which way anyone might turn. Duplicity gives rise to rumor, and rumor is divisive. As Luise White notes, “if we can historicize gossip, we can look at the boundaries and bonds of a community. Who says what about whom, to whom, articulates the alliances and affiliations of the conflicts of daily life.”³³ As villagers attempt to forge community as a strategic identity that allows them to make demands upon the state—to suppress internal conflicts in order to present a unified front to state and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—gossip becomes explosive. In one community village authorities passed the Ley Contra Chismes (Law Against Gossip) in an attempt to control the power of words to rip the village apart. Authorities tried to control the verbal economy, recognizing that words wound.

      This novice anthropologist sought to help, to heal, to demonstrate she meant no harm. I did not realize I was engaging in fields of power I did not perceive or comprehend. I had entered a world of stories, silences, secrets—a world in which trying to catch my bearings left me reeling more often than not.

       Teodoro Huanaco’s Eye

      One day a high-pitched voice sang greetings from outside our door in Carhuahurán. A slender man with smooth skin and a tightly clenched left eye stood outside, his hands grasped in front of him. I had never seen him before, but he brought potatoes to barter for sugar, and I invited him in.

      Efraín and I learned his name was Teodoro Huanaco and that he was from Pera. He had come to Carhuahurán during the violence, as had so many people from his village. As he told us, Sendero arrived killing, not talking, in Pera.

      We sat sipping miski yaku (coffee sweetened with sugar until it reached a syrupy consistency) and chatting for quite awhile. I did not want to be rude but was more than a bit curious about his left eye. It remained closed during his entire visit. I finally asked if he felt well, hoping that might lead us to the topic. It did, and he began explaining why his eye was clenched shut, only opening from three to five o’clock each afternoon.

      Several weeks earlier, don Teodoro had gotten very drunk coming home from the feria (open-air market) when it was still held an hour-and-a-half walk away in Huaynacancha. He fell down a steep slope and passed out, spending the night in the bitter cold. The next day, he could no longer open his eye: he had been grabbed by daño (an illness caused by the mountain gods).³⁴

      He had thought about joining the Evangelical Church to see if that would cure his eye, but he was reluctant to give up his trago (alcohol) and his coca. “Without coca we can’t do anything here. To work we need coca. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with chewing coca—it’s what the Virgin Mary gave us. During her flight when she was so tired and worried,

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