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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) universalism via a litany of examples that at times resemble a compendium of exotica.⁵ I am not interested 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.

* * *

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 need to understand is that they’ve already forgotten everything that happened.” He leaned forward. “Look. We are capable of abstract thought. That’s why we have suffered so much. But they only think in a concrete way—they only think about their daily food and their animals. They don’t think beyond that. That’s why they haven’t suffered like we have. They aren’t capable of it.” Evidently, being such concrete thinkers, “they” only have access to a range of primary emotions, while the loftier sentiments—love for a child, grief for the murder of a loved one, hope for a different sort of future—are reserved for “us.”

There is no way to approach the themes of mental health, political violence, and its legacies without addressing ethnic discrimination, a form of psychological violence that cuts across every aspect of daily life for Quechua-speaking campesinos. Nelson Manrique has noted there is no sense of national tragedy in Peru, and this has to do with the characteristics of those who were killed or disappeared during the violence.¹⁶ In the politics of death in Peru, loss of life is measured according to a hierarchy of cultural and ethnic differences. So, evidently, is suffering. Pain and its expression are deeply cultural, and how one suffers and makes that suffering manifest will be contoured by the structures of discrimination that shape bodily experience, social hierarchies, and access to services. It is necessary to discuss ethnic discrimination, how this maps onto a geography of difference, and then situate “talking trauma” within this discussion.

I recall the campesinos who described their experiences as internally displaced people during the violence. They found it agonizing to “wander in foreign lands,” and their poverty was extreme. As one woman recalled, “In the cities everything is money—even to urinate, they charge you fifty céntimos. We didn’t even have money for food.” However, although lamenting the poverty and hunger that characterized those years, what was poignant was her tearful insistence that “The poverty was terrible, but the mistreatment was worse. Chuto nikurawanchik they called us—chutos, filthy chutos.” In many conversations with “returnees,” the discriminatory treatment they endured in the cities enters into their motives for returning to their communities or for reconstructing them.

According to the Diccionario de la Lengua de la Real Academia Española, the word chuto comes from the Aymara ch’utu, which means “of thick lips.” The definition continues: “Said of a crude, uncultured, dirty person; insulting; Indian of the puna.” There is a fusion of physical and geographical characteristics, constructing both the puna and its inhabitants as wild, as savage. However, the dictionary definition is relatively mild when compared to how the word chuto is used in daily life. Among ethnic insults, chuto is a word that is especially lacerating, and Quechua speakers learn at an early age how deeply the insult can cut.

* * *

The children came piling into our room in Huaychao and began enthusiastically spreading the colored pieces of a jigsaw puzzle across our rickety table. Active hands grabbed the pieces, locating them one way and another until a design began to emerge inside the wooden frame.

The children completed the puzzle and then dumped the pieces upside down to start all over again. While they scrambled the pieces, Edith and Juanjo explained there would be a drawing competition in Huanta, part of a commemorative event that would take place in the municipal stadium. The children were invited to paint murals on the walls of the stadium as part of an effort to reinscribe the space following the years La Marina (navy) had used it as a detention and torture center.

Their faces lit up with the idea: a trip to the city, painting, mandarin oranges, ice cream. They began to talk all at once about what they were going to paint, the volume increasing with their excitement. Suddenly, in the midst of the happiness provoked by the idea of a trip to the city, Edgar posed a question that silenced this group of boys—just little guys ranging from six to ten years old. “But if we go to Huanta, what if they call us chutos?”¹⁷

* * *

Ethnic hierarchies are mapped onto geography in Peru, and despite the massive movement of people, there is a tenacious cartography underpinning discrimination.¹⁸ While campesinos also mark territory and difference in a variety of ways, the capacity to define and assign inferior status to certain regions and their inhabitants follows broader power dynamics. Quechua speakers are acutely aware of where they are located (literally and metaphorically) in Peru’s ethnic hierarchy. Enter “talking trauma.”

One institutionalized site of racism is the Peruvian health care system.¹⁹ In each community, people complain about the ill treatment and expired medications they receive in the health posts. During one visit to Cayara, I headed to the health post in search of a remedy for stomach cramps. In the waiting room a large sign declared the results of a needs assessment the medical staff had conducted:

It is necessary to mention that the idiosyncrasy of the villagers makes it difficult to carry out the activities of health professionals. This is due to the still persistent taboos, myths and other customs of the community, as well as other sociological factors.²⁰

There is a tendency to assume that cosmopolitan medicine—that is, biomedical models—are outside of culture, transparently reflecting a universal biology without cultural mediation. From this perspective, culture is something belonging to the “other” and serves as an obstacle to the advance of science and its double, modernity. In my interviews with personnel in rural health posts, the “beliefs” and baja cultura of the campesinos were frequently cited as barriers to service provision and compliance. As the sign hanging in that waiting room proclaims, “abandon your myths and taboos at the doorstep, all ye who enter here.”

This thinking infuses program design and delivery. For instance, the government agency established to coordinate postwar reconstruction efforts—the Programa de Apoyo al Repoblamiento (PAR)—compiled the results of focus groups held throughout Ayacucho on the theme of sequelae and reparations.²¹ On page 68 of the report, the authors assert it was a great “advance” that participants in their focus groups spoke of “being traumatized” and located mental health within their priorities.

The assertion that this is an “advance” is perplexing. Evidently, if before campesinos had their taboos and myths, now they were suffering in scientific style. If campesinos say they need elixirs for daño, offerings for the apus, qayapa (“calling the soul”) for susto, perhaps they have not suffered, or perhaps their suffering is simply inconceivable.

One day during the TRC process I discussed my research project with a group of young men in Uchuraccay. They were dressed in tennis shoes, jeans, and cheap ski jackets; baseball caps sat snugly atop the brightly colored chullos they wore to keep their ears warm. Older people, particularly the women, referred to these young men as moderña warmakuna (modern young people). Often as not, the term was a lament! Several of these moderña warmakuna had spent part of their lives in the city, just children when their parents packed up what they could and fled during the internal armed conflict.

I discussed some of the themes that had surfaced in the research, such as daño and llakis, and was interested in hearing what they thought about these ailments. They laughed a bit, kicking the ground with their tennis shoes. Julian, one of the moderña warmakuna, shook his head and scoffed: “You know, I’ve studied in the city. I lived there and I went to school. Daño, llakis—all that’s just belief. Only the ignorant and illiterate believe all that. I studied in the city and I know what we have is trauma.”²²

How one is ill both reflects and establishes social status.²³ With the influx of state and NGO interventions throughout Ayacucho, campesinos learned to express suffering in a language that could make their suffering legible to the experts, to “outsiders.” Talking trauma legitimates their pain in the face of those who discard their afflictions as mere superstition or survivals from some distant past. One motivation for talking trauma is recognition—recognition for being someone just as capable of suffering as the person sitting on the other side of the desk in the health post, or holding a clipboard and pen, poised to complete the PTRC’s questionnaire.²⁴

Veena Das and Ranendra Das’s comments on medical pluralism echo here: “Although biomedical categories and therapies have reached different parts of the world in very different ways, the condition of medical diversity or medical pluralism is now universal. The fact raises significant questions about how concepts of health and illness travel. How are these concepts translated, and how do people deal with different expert cultures in making intimate bodily experiences available for therapeutic intervention?”²⁵ In addition to asking how people translate illness categories and what sorts of claims are expressed via the identities and social dynamics these categories construct, it is worth exploring how people understand what interventions, in this case psychological services, can do.

“Too Much Memory”

One morning Edgar, the guard in the TRC’s Ayacucho office, peered around my door. “Doctora Kimberly, there’s someone here to see you. He says he’s from Hualla.”

Both Edith and I headed out to see who it was. The man standing just inside the enormous wooden portal was unknown to us, at least until he introduced himself: Hernán Pariona. Edith and I exchanged a furtive glance and anticipation tickled the back of my neck. We had never met Hernán, but we had heard so much about him from people in Hualla. He had been one of the key Shining Path militants in town and, depending upon the speaker’s allegiance during the war, he was alternately described with admiration, hatred, or fear.

We invited him into our office and began some small talk as Nescafé crystals slowly dissolved in our cups of hot water. Hernán had been living in Ica for a few years, returning occasionally to Hualla to tend to the land he owned. On this trip he had come straight from Hualla to our office because he had been told about our research team.

“People said you were working on mental health, and that’s what we need,” he explained. “We need psychological treatment in Hualla.”

I was struck by his request. It was the first time someone had placed psychological treatment on the list of needs they discussed with me. I quickly replayed some conversations in my mind. Several people in Hualla had assured us theirs was a “traumatized pueblo,” describing the bitter conflicts that surfaced when people were drinking. I recalled one of José Carlos’s field note entries: Several people had complained to him about how tense Hualla was. “People start insulting each other, calling each other terrucos [slang for “terrorists,” referring to members of Shining Path]. They say, ‘I know what you did.’ Others threaten, reminding us just who we’re living with.”

I hesitated for a moment. “Hernán, tell me a bit more about the psychological treatment you want in Hualla.”

He shifted in his chair and exhaled his frustration. “Life in Hualla is impossible! People argue all the time. Before we can even think about reconciliation, we need psychological treatment.”

“And what is it about psychological treatment in particular that would help?” I wondered.

“Well, everybody keeps remembering everything. They keep insulting each other, especially when they’re drunk. It’s one big fight. If we could have professional attention—therapy with a professional—we could forget everything that happened.”

“So, therapy would be necessary so you could live together again?”

Hernán nodded. “That’s right. You know what the big problem in Hualla is? There’s too much memory—way too much memory,” repeating the line for emphasis. “With psychological treatment, we could forget everything. That way we could live together again—peacefully,” he added.

Hernán’s understanding of therapy and what it might achieve is fascinating. Somehow professional attention could erase the memories and assist people in achieving a state of forgetfulness. This is certainly at odds with the redemptive vision of memory that characterizes contemporary memory politics. Even more interesting was the person soliciting the therapy: a former Shining Path cadre who later assured me that ex-Senderistas were marginalized and mal visto (negatively viewed) in Hualla by those who blame them for the devastation of the internal armed conflict. Too much memory indeed.²⁶

Returning to the section of the PTRC’s Final Report in which the mental health team analyzed the 401 testimonies, there is a finding that bears upon this discussion: “Despite the lack of mental health services in the country, which carries with it a lack of information on the part of the population about the type of attention and help they could receive from this sort of service, eleven percent of the [401] testimonies analyzed registered explicit requests for psychological support to respond to the effects of the political violence.”²⁷ What is intriguing, even more than the small percentage of people who requested psychological support, is that we do not know what that 11 percent think psychological support might do for them and for those around them.

Despite their omnipresent criticisms of their health posts, people are not rejecting medical care per se. Indeed, claiming trauma is in part a demand for services. Talking trauma is one way of constructing the intervenable subject—individually and collectively. There will be no projects providing elixirs for daño, no NGOs heading to the mountains with sacrifices for the apus. Interventions and their subjects must fit within a modernist paradigm: angry ancestors no, trauma yes. The modern subject of suffering is traumatized.

However, if the researcher listens to the concerns of survivors in these communities, then she must focus on social disorders, injustice, angry gods, witchcraft, poverty, and spiritual and moral confusion. The researcher must account for a social world that is dangerous and capable of producing affliction. Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman have suggested that the ethnographer focus on what is at stake for particular people in particular situations in order to understand the social-psychological characteristics of life in local moral worlds.²⁸ What is at stake in postwar contexts is the reconstruction of social relationships, moral communities, cultural forms, and economic networks, and the reinvention of ritual life that allows people to make sense of suffering endured and suffering inflicted.²⁹

I oriented my research around a few basic questions: What do people suffer from? What aches and why? Whom do they hold responsible and what should be done with them? How do people talk about what is wrong with their world, and how might it be set right? These questions led to the theories Quechua speakers have developed about the body and memory, about emotions and illness, and about the qualities that constitute being human.

* * *

Marcos was the promotor de salud (a layperson trained in first aid)³⁰ in Carhuahurán. He came by early one morning, seeking assistance in writing a request for funds to establish a “soup kitchen” for children under the age of five. Marcos brought a clean sheet of white paper and the community’s rusty typewriter with him.

In the request, Marcos discussed how the political violence had severely affected Carhuahurán, prompting him to solicit funding to open the Children of Jesus Soup Kitchen. I suggested we strengthen the request by incorporating statistics from the health post indicating that 80 percent of the children in Carhuahurán and its eleven outlying annexes (pagos) suffered from chronic malnutrition. Marcos nodded emphatically: “Yes. You know, here we need to think of the violences,” emphasizing that chronic hunger and poverty would require us to speak of violence in its plural form.³¹ War and poverty had both assaulted his community, with various consequences. Violence is frequently described as senseless, which I accept with modification. Horrific violence destroys accepted meanings (while creating others) and assaults the sensory organs. Allen Feldman has referred to a “sensorium of violence” to capture how one’s perceptions are altered by armed conflict and fear.³² 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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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 turned to sobbing and she shook her head: “No. I just walked out everyday behind my corral and untied that sack.”³⁸

This conversation with Dionisia still unsettles me, and I have returned to it many times as I struggle to understand memory, the body, and affliction. Memory is achingly bittersweet. Of course she wants to remember her son but has tried so hard to forget the horrible way Teodoro was killed and the impossibility of mourning his death and burying him as would befit a beloved son. So she ties the sack tightly, only to open it and touch his clothes an innumerable one-last-time.

During my research in Ayacucho, various women asked, “Oh, why should we remember everything that happened? To martirize our bodies, and nothing else?” Others insisted their martirio (martyrdom) had already begun, starting with an audible rasping in the marrow of their bones. The term “martyr” shares a root with the Latin word memor. The martyr is one who voluntarily suffers as punishment for having been a witness. The corporality of memory is central, and the link between the body and memory is evident in the Latin root “testes,” from which the words “testicle” and testigo (witness) are drawn. The root privileged men as the bearers and reproducers of memory, eclipsing women and their “martyred bodies.” In contrast, Veena Das has suggested, “the representation of suffering is such that it is experienced metonymically as bodily pain and it is the female body that shelters this pain in its insides forever.”³⁹ These women were lamenting the bodily toll of remembering and bearing witness.

Dionisia was plagued by llakis, one of the most prevalent afflictions throughout the region.⁴⁰ Llaki, in the singular, can be translated as “sadness” or “pain,” but that scarcely does justice to this complex term. Llakis are painful thoughts or memories that fill the heart where they are charged with affect. These “emotional thoughts” blur the distinction between intellectual and affective faculties, just as the heart is the seat of emotion as well as memory. Llakis can be the product of either political violence or the poverty that serves as a trigger for remembering all that one has lost. This suffering is not merely a state of mind: it is an embodied state of being.

The thoughts begin in your head, but they drop down to your heart. When they reach your heart, they become llakis because of the pain.

—Hilario Pulido, promotor de salud, Accomarca

When you have pain/sadness, thoughts arrive in your heart. Your heart opens up like a pot with no lid. Your heart cannot contain all of this, all of the llakis, and you become pure pain/sadness.

—Benedicta Mendoza, Accomarca

Llakiwan kachkani can be translated as “I am in pain,” consumed by sadness. Llakis surge from the heart, overflowing its capacity to contain so many hurtful memories. As they fill the body, “you become pure pain or sadness.” This is a “hydraulic model” of the emotions; emotions rise, fall, bear down upon, and travel through the body. There was another powerful expression several women used: Yuyaynipas tapawan (“My memories suffocate me”). Beneath the weight of reminiscence, the person cannot breathe and their heart aches. Llakis can rob the person of their use of reason, leaving them sonso (senseless or mad). And as llakis mature in the body, they can be fatal.

Many people described their search for a way to cleanse their bodies of llakis. Among methods of cleansing are the use of guinea pigs to “scan” the body, drinking agua de olvido (water of forgetfulness, caught as river water runs downstream and forms whirlpools), and the faith healing that occurs in the Evangelical churches. When the women took mama Dionisia to the river and had her drink water caught in the whirlpool, they hoped to cleanse her body and relieve her suffering.⁴¹ Another important point: to claim one is in pain is to place a demand upon others to respond.⁴²

The word llakis frequently appears together with pensamientos (thoughts or worries). Señora Victoria Pariona in Cayara described the effect of pensamientos:

I always have pensamientos. I’m worried. Sometimes I’m so enraged that I cry, and I have to calm myself down. That’s how I am. This pensamiento is very heavy, and because of this I ask myself, “What sort of life is it that God allows our destiny to be like this?” The pensamientos grab you, really suddenly. A pensamiento arrives when you’re doing just anything. In that exact moment it grabs you. When you’re headed to the path, walking, or sometimes at night, too, when you’re tired and sleeping—you’re calm and then suddenly a pensamiento arrives and you ask yourself again, “What sort of life is this?”

There is a temporal aspect associated with llakis that allows us to distinguish between llakis and another term that was prevalent in testimonies during the war years: ñakariy (to agonize).⁴³ One agonizes in the moment of horror, but it is with the memories and their unchecked accumulation over time that llakis grab the person. The person suffering from llakis is suffering from a memory affliction. Just as a person can possess memory, so can memory possess the person, grabbing them, filling their body, maturing to the point that their body itself becomes unbearable. So villagers emphasize their desire to forget.

I had a long conversation in 1997 with a group of women in Umaru, a community that had been virtually destroyed during the war. I was seated with the women amid the burned-out remains of someone’s home, conducting a health care needs assessment for an NGO. At one point during our conversation, I asked the women which health care services were a priority in their community. Past experience indicated that a question about services needed could solicit responses that ranged from livestock to food to materials to build an Evangelical church. The women murmured briefly among themselves, and finally one woman responded on behalf of the group: “What we need most are pills to make us forget.”

Forgetting is more than a strategy of the powerful over the weak. There are desired forgettings and, as Elizabeth Jelin has argued, “There are forms of forgetting that are ‘necessary’ for the survival and functioning of the individual subject as well as for groups and communities.”⁴⁴ There is a need to open space for “positive forgetfulness” that liberates a person from an unbearable past. Forgetting and remembering to forget were leitmotifs throughout these communities.

These memory afflictions are different from les maladies de la mémoire that concerned the founders of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.⁴⁵ The work of these analysts was situated within concerns about the reality of intrapsychic phenomenon, unclaimed traumatic experience and its recovery, and broader debates regarding the normal and the abnormal. In contrast, llakis and “martirizing” one’s body are not experienced within a framework of individual normality or abnormality; there is no stigma conferred upon those suffering from llakis; nor do llakis isolate the sufferer. These memory afflictions do not index an internal world of private suffering but a social world that causes distress, and they invoke a chain of mutual aid and response.⁴⁶ The memory of unaddressed wrongs, of economic dispossession, of loved ones brutally killed—these memory afflictions indict a social world that is capable of making people very ill indeed.

The Frightened Breast

My daughter was born the day after the massacre at Lloqllepampa. We were hidden in a hut. I told my husband to leave because if the soldiers came they would have killed him. I gave birth all alone. During that time we were escaping, I didn’t even have milk to breastfeed my baby. How was I going to have milk when there was nothing to eat? One day the other women told me, “If you leave your baby in the mountain, alcanzo [also known as daño] will grab her and she’ll die.” Remembering this, I left her in the mountain so she would die. How was she going to live like that? I’d passed all of my suffering in my blood, in my milk. I watched her from a distance, but she began to cry so much I had to go back and get her so that the soldiers wouldn’t hear her. If they had, they would’ve killed me. That’s why I say my daughter is damaged because of everything that happened, and because of my milk, my blood, my pensamientos. Now she can’t study. She’s seventeen and she’s still in fifth grade. She says her head hurts, it burns. What could it be? Susto? Ever since she was a baby she’s been like this. I took her to a curandero and he tried to change her luck. But it’s no better—it just stays the same. I took her to the health post and they gave her pills [Dioxycillin] to take everyday. What could it be? Nothing helps her.

—Salomé Baldeón, Accomarca

There is another reason people, particularly women, attempt to forget and spare their bodies further martyrdom.⁴⁷ Not only do toxic memories torment them; they also pose a danger to their children. Quechua speakers have elaborated a sophisticated theory regarding the transmission of suffering and susto from mother to child, either in utero or via the mother’s breast-milk. The term used in Quechua is mancharisqa ñuñu. Ñuñu can mean both breast and milk depending on the context and the suffix, and mancharisqa refers to susto or fear. In my Spanish publications, I have translated the term as la teta asustada (the frightened breast) to capture this double meaning. La teta asustada conveys how strong negative emotions and memories can alter the body and how a mother can transmit these harmful emotions to her baby.⁴⁸ Quechua speakers insist the frightened breast can damage a baby, leaving the child slow-witted or predisposed to epilepsy.

In addition to Salomé’s daughter, there are six other young people in Accomarca with various congenital problems: they are deaf, mute, or suffering from epileptiform attacks. These young people are collectively referred to as “children of the massacre.” All of their mothers were pregnant when the soldiers entered Accomarca, rounded people up in Lloqllepampa, and killed them. The mothers of these seven young people escaped and watched the killing from their hiding places in the surrounding mountains. All seven women gave birth in the days and weeks following the atrocities.

Rather than disregard this as anecdotal evidence, it echoes the findings of a study conducted in Chile, where a team of researchers studied the impact of political violence on pregnant women. For the study, the researchers determined which barrios of Santiago had suffered the most political violence and disappearances. They selected a sample of barrios, ranging from low to high levels of political violence. They followed the pregnancies and deliveries of a group of women from each barrio and, when they controlled for confounding variables, the researchers determined that the women who had lived in the most violent barrios suffered a fivefold increase in pregnancy and delivery complications.⁴⁹ Both the epidemiological study and the pervasive theory that villagers have with respect to the damaging effects of violence, terror, and llakis on both a mother and her baby are suggestive and warrant further study. These women and their children provide a painful example of the violence of memory.

Rural Afflictions

When I began working with rural communities in Ayacucho, I asked people which illnesses were most common. There was an answer that has stayed with me: “Well … coughs, colds, colic. But more than illnesses, it’s the males de campo⁵⁰ that grab us.” On several occasions I was told los males de campo (rural afflictions) would not grab me because I was from the city and “did not believe in them,” which illustrates the ethnicized geography discussed earlier. In addition to marking territory and status, this phrasing distinguishes between the ailments that send one to the health post versus those that prompt a visit to the curandero.

Throughout Ayacucho, biomedically oriented health posts coexist with curanderos, healers whose innovative bricolage defies the term “traditional.” Villagers go to the health post for the bags of fortified powdered milk the government distributes, as well as for the treatment of bronchitis and malaria and for birth control. These are considered strictly “health problems”—medical issues for which the health post may be useful. It is with the curanderos, however, that villagers address what is wrong with the world: ancestors who are angry, the envious neighbor who has placed a curse, the llakis that riddle the body with pain, ex-enemies whose presence in the village irritates the heart, and the earth itself that reaches up and grabs those who carelessly tread where they should not.

Curanderos can serve as lay psychologists by treating the relational aspects of life; they diagnose “social ills.” While one may visit the health post for an acute but short-term problem, with curanderos there is follow-up and frequently a series of visits. Importantly, with curanderos there is respectful interaction. Within a population that resists the idea of spending two soles (roughly sixty-five cents) for a trip to the health post, patients may well pay the curandero with a sheep in exchange for his services.⁵¹

Males de campo refer to disordered social relations and to the spiritual and moral confusion that characterizes a postwar society. Indeed, these males de campo frequently arise from strong negative emotions. Michel Tousignant has noted that emotions are generally conceived throughout Latin America as important etiological factors of illnesses.⁵² In addition to causing individual illness, certain emotions are considered socially disruptive and dangerous. Managing strong negative or retributive emotions is one part of managing conflict.

Carlos Alberto Seguín has suggested many illnesses in these communities have an “ethnoreligious” aspect.⁵³ In contrast with PTSD, which marginalizes the spiritual plane, these males de campo have a strong religious component. The separation of spheres of experience into nonporous categories (for example, natural/supernatural, secular/religious) is an obstacle to understanding the semantic world in which these villagers become ill, recover—in which they live.

“The males de campo grab us.” The verb in Quechua is qapiy and deserves a few additional words. A woman in Accomarca described her pain and how difficult it is to be alone because “When I’m alone, the sadness follows and wants to grab me.” Similarly, alcanzo can grab a person when they step or sit where they should not, angering the apus, who grab the person with vomiting, fever, and overall bodily pain. The harmful agent is not located within the individual: rather, the “badness” or “evil” enters and grabs the person. This exteriority is important when we consider the rehabilitation of perpetrators and the processes used to cleanse them of their evil or wrongdoing. This is one component of a complex understanding of agency, accountability, and the force of things: objects, words, and violence itself are imbued with their own agency.⁵⁴

The healing processes used by campesinos emphasize cleansing and purgation. The idea of cleansing one’s interior and purging the “badness” is common and is invoked at the communal level as well. Villagers often exteriorize the violence (“the violence arrived here”) and the Senderistas (“they arrived here—where could they have come from?”). People attempt to locate the cause of sociopolitical problems outside the community, depicting the violence and its perpetrators as invading the collective. One long-standing sanction in communal justice is the banishment of the perpetrator, a form of “purging” the community.⁵⁵ These ideas influence the processes of rehabilitation and reconciliation. The emphasis on exteriorizing harmful agents serves psychological and social needs: it opens space for one to regain his or her humanity via cleansing and confession, and permits people to assimilate more slowly just whom they are living with. These illnesses and their alleviation figure strongly in the violence, both its making and its unmaking.

Weakness

I’m already so old. I don’t even know how old I am! Maybe eighty. Before I was happy—now, there’s so much suffering. With so many pensamientos, with iquyasqa I’m so old. Those years were penitence, sacrifice. We had to hide in the hills, without eating, without sleeping. The soldiers killed my two little children when we were hiding in Lloqllepampa. We were escaping, hiding in the hills. So my little boy said, “Mami, I need to pee.” “Ya, go ahead,” I told him. When he was peeing, that damned soldier shot him in his penis. The bullet passed through him from behind. The same thing with my little girl—the bullet passed right through her stomach. That night I cried, holding them at my side—my little boy under one arm, my little girl under the other. I cried all night, I mourned all night. The following day I kept escaping, hiding myself in fear. Oh, some people say all of that is coming back again. If that happens, I’d rather take some poison and die. I could never live through that again! I’d rather throw myself in the river—I’d rather jump off a cliff! I can’t forget. Oh, I’m so old now.

—Señora Edelina Chuchón, fifty-six years old, Accomarca, 2003

In English we could translate iquyasqa as “weakness.” It is the sensation of profound physical exhaustion, as if one did not have the energy to carry out even minimal daily activities. Women lamented, “We’ve cried so much we’ve lost our vision because of weakness.” They associate this weakness with the political violence and the suffering of the sasachakuy tiempo. As Señora Edelina graphically described, iquyasqa ages the body.⁵⁶ Adult women of all ages complained of iquyasqa, underscoring the toll the sasachakuy tiempo had taken upon them. Women of reproductive age routinely stated they were so weak they “died” while giving birth and had to be resuscitated afterward. Villagers and medical personnel in the health posts both use the term “weakness” but assign a different etiology to this affliction. While the majority of “lay interviewees” locate the cause of iquyasqa in the upheaval of the political violence and its legacies, the medical personnel I interviewed reduced the problem to poor nutrition, erasing the psychological suffering indexed in the common usage of the term.

Here is an opportunity to analyze how the same word may have different connotations for the villagers and for the medical personnel stationed in the health posts. Malnutrition is chronic in the countryside and was exacerbated by the violence because people could not engage in normal agricultural production. However, I insist that we follow the complex meaning of the term as the women use it. Campesinas juxtapose their weakness now with the energy they had “during the time of meat” when “we wanted for nothing.” This is not just nostalgia, and they are not referring exclusively to the material sphere: more is being remembered than simply “the time of meat.” Ayacucho has always been among the poorest departments in Peru. However, that is not how people remember their lives. Villagers had homes with thick straw roofs that kept out the rain and the wind; now they have corrugated aluminum roofs that inevitably channel frigid raindrops down the back of the neck and onto a shivering back. They had livestock and fields that were continuously planted; during the war, 65 percent of land remained fallow and most villagers saw their livestock almost completely lost or killed.⁵⁷ Virtually everyone lost a family member or someone dear to them, often in brutally violent ways. Local biologies have been altered by the sasachakuy tiempo.

Iquyasqa—profound, bone-penetrating exhaustion. Words do not just express our experiences of loss, pain, or suffering; they orient us in the world and in our bodies. To be war-weary—iquyasqa—is a phenomenological reality. It also serves as powerful motivation to avoid repeating a bloody past and to engage in individual and collective practices designed to keep further conflict at bay.

Hardening the Heart

To remember: from the Latin word re-cordis, to pass again through the heart.

—Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces

The heart is the most important organ in terms of memory, health, and affliction and plays a central role in repentance and reconciliation. We recall that llakis refer to painful memories that keep passing through the heart, lacerating its soft tissue. Various curanderos described how they treated their patients in order to “harden their hearts.” With the use of herbs and by sharing examples of suffering they themselves have overcome, curanderos help their patients who must endure great suffering. During the internal armed conflict, hardening the heart was a means of tolerating pain and loss. As Dionisia lamented, better to have been a rock all those years, better never to have felt anything. Beyond tolerating pain, however, hardening the heart also implied the restriction of love and compassion (caridad) for one’s fellow creatures. In a time of extremely reduced resources—and the intimate violence that distorted social relations—compassion was also diminished, reminding us there is a political economy of the emotions.⁵⁸ When people spoke about the origins of the sasachakuy tiempo, they emphasized that hatred (odio) and envy (envidia) played a key role in fomenting lethal violence. Additionally, as with the envious gentiles that God punished with the rain of fire, the violence was widely described as a punishment from Dios Tayta for the unbridled expression of odio and envidia.59 Qocha—a polysemic Quechua word meaning “sin,” “crime,” or “error”—captures the porous realms of human and divine affairs and transgressions.

However, as don Jesús Romero explained, times change and so do norms. One part of recuperation is recovering the capacity to access a range of emotions and not only those associated with political violence such as fear, hatred, or rancor. This was the key theme of a communal event in Sacsamarca, located in the central-southern region of Ayacucho.

In May 2003, villagers organized a day of reconciliation in their community. The chapel in the cemetery was filled with people as one activity included a visit to the cemetery to honor “all of our war heroes.” This illustrates a central theme of the day’s agenda: all who died during the violence, regardless of their allegiances, were human beings. In an attempt to overcome the victim-perpetrator dichotomy, villagers imparted the message that everyone gathered in the chapel was a survivor.

In the church a member of the community addressed the crowd, flickering candles grasped between their hands. Orlando is a young man, and there was a striking contrast between his smooth complexion and the deeply wrinkled faces of the elderly women gathered in the chapel. Orlando reminded the crowd that during the violence they had all hardened their hearts. Now, in the process of reconciling, he spoke to them of the need to once again have “softened hearts”—hearts capable of feeling, loving, remembering.

We offer this homage to our heroes, thinking of how our pueblo will be different. We are born with white [pure] hearts, and it is with a white heart that we should die, for the good of our pueblo. No one should be allowed to stain our hearts. If we stain our hearts, we will only have a lifetime of tears [waqay vida]. We should die with white hearts. We must forgive, ask for forgiveness, so that never again will these same things come to pass. If our heart is a rock, we must change. We are passing one another with our hearts of rock, with our pensamientos that cause us such pain. Let’s change. We must open our hearts because our pueblo is waiting for us so that we can all live well with our families. We must speak with one another with our white hearts. From this day forth, let’s change our hearts so that we don’t have llaki vida, waqay vida [a life of pain, a life of tears]. We must soften our hearts so that we can change.

The emphasis on softening the heart, and on change, is striking. One must learn to live with the memories, many of which are personified in the faces of family members or neighbors, without each memory overwhelming the heart’s capacity to contain it.

“Changing one’s life” is a central psychocultural theme. Campesinos visit curanderos to change their suerte (luck or destiny); congregations in the Evangelical churches pray to God so that He will change their hearts and their lives. Importantly, when the context changes, so does the person. Many people described the process of arrepentimiento (repentance): “After repenting, we go forth with a clean heart. We are no longer the people we were before. We are musaq runakuna—new people.”

This was powerfully conveyed by El Piki in Carhuahurán. In the midst of a long conversation about the violence, I asked him what he thought about reconciliation. He replied by telling me about a friend whom he had known since primary school and how he had participated in Sendero. “It was difficult, but we can accept the arrepentidos [the ex-Senderistas, literally, ‘the repentant ones’]. As long as they act like runakuna [people] they can come back. We have to pardon them or we would hate them. Dios Tayta says we must pardon them so we can live with a tranquil heart.”⁶⁰

The idea of a tranquil heart appeared in many of our conversations and serves as one motivation for reconstructing social relationships that were distorted during the violence. Perhaps it is useful to consider the opposite—corazoniypas irritasqa, or irritation of the heart—which is an illness in its own right, as mama Zenaida explained to us in Hualla:

I’m sick with irritation of the heart. It grabs you when you cry, when you have pensamientos, sadness, rage. Before I used to be grabbed by fainting—oh, I died [wañurqani] for an hour at a time! That was when my irritation was just starting—it wasn’t mature yet like it is now. Because of my poverty, I died without even realizing it. I would even wake up like I was in a dream. I didn’t remember absolutely anything that had happened. Now I feel like my irritation has accumulated like blood, accumulated in my stomach. It doesn’t let me eat. That’s why I’m drying up [charkiqa kachkani]. Look at my hand—I’m like a skinny cow!

Several things can produce irritation of the heart. Mama Zenaida mentioned pensamientos, sadness, and rage.⁶¹ Many women lamented the toll that rage had taken on their bodies; mal de rabia (the illness of rage) was most often described as the sensation that one’s nerves were throbbing uncontrollably, crawling just under the surface of the skin, refusing to leave the person in peace. Sadness and rage, when they grab the person and mature, result in serious, life-threatening afflictions.⁶²

Finally, there is the verb wañurqani (“I died”). The first time a woman used this term, I was at a loss to understand her. She insisted she had died several times but now died only once in a while. As I would learn, fainting and losing consciousness are understood to be states similar to death. Both sadness and poverty can provoke fainting, as can the presence of defiant perpetrators who walk the streets of these pueblos.

Epidemic: Witches, Gods, and Bones

Several months after don Teofilo had put me in my place, he did begin to share a bit of his knowledge, although I was never fully trusted by this powerful, tiny man. He assured me there was an epidemic in the alturas of Huanta: there was daño (witchcraft); alcanzo, an illness caused by the apus (mountain gods) who punish the person who sits or steps where they should not; and aya, caused by coming into contact with the bones of the gentiles (ancestors). The gentiles were the people who lived before the time of Christ, and God sent down a rain of fire to punish them for being envious (envidiosos). They attempted to save themselves by entering the mountains, where their remains continue to cause illness to the unfortunate people whose bones they invade.⁶³

These illnesses began to increase uncontrollably in 1984 when the fighting became so intense that both life and the landscape were in upheaval. People began fleeing, sleeping in caves for fear of attacks. As El Piki explained, “In those times we escaped to the mountains, we slept in the caves. That’s why we’re sick. We’re always getting sick. Alcanzo grabbed us—aya grabbed us. We were sleeping in caves with the bones of the gentiles. That’s why so many people died with weakness. It’s a slow wasting, until you die because the illness matures inside you.”

Once military bases were established throughout the countryside, campesinos were obligated to live in nucleated settlements for security purposes. This new spatial practice gave rise to more envidia as neighbors now lived next door as opposed to a steep slope away. The fighting also made it too dangerous for El Piki to head out regularly to the mountains and place pagapus (offerings or sacrifices) on behalf of villagers who were requesting godly intervention in resolving problems. “I could no longer speak regularly with Madre Rasuhuillca [Mother Rasuhuillca, the highest mountain in the region]. She is la senõra de la medicina, la señora abogada [the lady of medicine, the lady lawyer].”

In a time of profoundly conflictive social relationships—envious neighbors as well as different alliances during the war, which generated tremendous distrust—Madre Rasuhuillca grew angry that villagers had forgotten their commitments to her and to the past. She sided with the Senderistas, allowing them to hide in the clouds surrounding her peak, the shrubs clustered on her slopes, and the holes in the earth that she opened for the guerrillas when they were pursued by the rondas campesinas. As numerous ronderos recalled, “When we went out to Rasuhuillca on patrol, we found flowers, cigarettes, limes—the Senderistas took pagapus. They had a pact with the mountains and that was why they could hide in the hills. The mountains opened up to let them in, and then hid them.”

Daño was rampant, and virtually every villager was currently suffering from alcanzo or had recently recovered.⁶⁴ Don Teofilo was called upon on a daily basis to climb up to the puna and try to repair villagers’ relationships with the gods, as well as cure them of the witchcraft performed by all-too-human perpetrators. El Piki treats social strife and conflictive relations. Madre Rasuhuillca is both doctor and lawyer; healing the individual body means administering justice in the social sphere.

Curanderos are memory specialists. In diagnosing patients, they listen carefully to determine which past event might be causing illness, as well as to determine which person in the patient’s life might wish to harm them via witchcraft.⁶⁵ They weave between the past and present, reminding fellow villagers of their debts to the dead and to the gods. As El Piki insisted, “The gods were angry that we forgot them during the sasachakuy tiempo. So I go out every day and talk with them. You must always remember them or they get angry.” Curanderos treat tenuous relationships—between the present and the past, between human beings, and between human beings and their capricious gods.

This chapter began by asking how best to respond to the psychological after-math of war. I have presented local idioms of suffering and resilience, demonstrating that ethnographic studies of postwar social worlds may not lead to psychological diagnoses but rather to the cultural logics involved in social strife and repair. People in these Andean communities are reconstructing a human way of life—the collective dimension—as well as individual lives. What is it that makes a life distinctly human?