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Overview
Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a novel use of a cycle of paintings, González examines the relationship between secrecy and memory. Her attention to the gaps and silences within both the Sarhuinos’ oral histories and the paintings reveals the pervasive reality of secrecy for people who have endured episodes of intense violence. González conveys how public secrets turn the process of unmasking into a complex mode of truth telling. Ultimately, public secrecy is an intricate way of “remembering to forget” that establishes a normative truth that makes life livable in the aftermath of a civil war.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226302713 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2011 |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
UNVEILING SECRETS OF WAR IN THE PERUVIAN ANDES
By OLGA M. GONZÁLEZ
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2011 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-30271-3
Chapter One
INTRODUCTIONSECRET OR FORGOTTEN MEMORIES?
Sarhua was only a place in my imagination in 1995, when I decided to do fieldwork there. It was an imaginary place, shaped by earlier visits to other Andean communities of Ayacucho, the accounts of travelers, and the ethnographic work of anthropologists such as Salvador Palomino (1984), John Earls and Irene Silverblatt (1977), and Rosa María Josefa Nolte (1991a), but most of all by the artwork of Sarhuino migrants. I had seen many of their paintings at tourist markets, souvenir shops, friends' houses, and at offices of nongovernmental organizations, as well as in some publications. It was mainly the Sarhuino imagination that introduced me to a place that from 1996 to 1997 became a reality and living experience to me.
Through Sarhuino paintings, known as tablas pintadas (painted boards), I learned about traditional customs and rituals, some that continue to be practiced and others that are part of the past. I also learned about social organization, reciprocity, and moral sanctions. I learned that sometimes donkeys, llamas, and pigs are disguises for qarqachas, human beings who have engaged in an incestuous relationship and can wander at night in the bodily form of domestic animals. But what attracted my interest most and became the main reason for my choice of Sarhua for research were the paintings on political violence, three of which I found published in Nolte's (1991a) book Qellcay: Arte y vida de Sarhua, comunidades campesinas andinas (Qellcay: Art and life of Sarhua, Andean peasant communities). These were paintings representing how Peru's armed conflict, which began in 1980 with the self-declared armed struggle of the Shining Path against the government, had affected the peasant community of Sarhua.
Another reason of importance for choosing the peasant community of Sarhua for my ethnographic study was its location in the central southern region of Ayacucho, Peru (see map 1). Previous fieldwork with displaced people from this region had made me aware of how understudied the region was, despite having been the epicenter of the armed conflict, since it was in this region that the Maoist Communist party of Peru, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), initiated its armed struggle in 1980. In 1996 ethnographic studies and fi eld reports from nongovernmental organizations concentrated on northern Ayacucho, where the impact of violence had been greater during the 1980s.
Also relevant was the fact that Sarhua was in the province of Víctor Fajardo (see map 2), which along with the province of Cangallo had been part of the Shining Path's Comité Zonal Fundamental (see map 3): here comités populares (popular committees) were created to reproduce and conquer bases of support upon which to build the "New Democracy" (Tapia 1997). Finally, the fact that Sendero had managed to get support from communities in the central-southern region of Ayacucho until the early 1990s was also an important reason for studying Sarhua. Ethnography focused on Sarhua would help fill the gap in community-based research on political violence in the central-southern region of Ayacucho.
The three paintings about political violence that caught my interest in Nolte's book were earlier versions of the ones that are part of the collection of twenty-four paintings titled Piraq Causa (Who Is Still to Blame?) (see gallery), 3 which focus on specific events of political violence in Sarhua. It was not until the end of my first year of fieldwork that I was able to locate in Costa Rica the twenty-four paintings that constitute the collection. The collection was created in the early 1990s by a group of Sarhuino painters living in Lima: Primitivo Evanán, Juan Walberto Quispe, Julián Ramos, Valeriana Vivanco, and Carmelón Berrocal, under the institutional name Asociación de Artistas Populares de Sarhua (Association of Popular Artists of Sarhua—ADAPS). The tablas pintadas on political violence were part of a larger trend in Ayacuchan folk arts around the theme of the war. Florentino Jiménez, one of the most renowned Ayacuchan artists, and his sons Claudio and Edilberto initiated this new thematic line on political violence in 1984 with the retablo "Martyrs of Uchuraccay" which represented the killing of eight Peruvian journalists. Inspired by this work and with the encouragement of left-leaning academics and human rights nongovernmental organizations, other Ayacuchan folk artists, working with pottery, weaving, and carving, began to create images depicting the violence and bearing witness to traumatic events. New lyrics set to the traditional Andean music of the foremost Ayachuchan performers Manuelcha Prado and Carlos Falconi also reflected the sorrow of the war. These artistic works entered the realm of what Nolte (1991a) has called "testimonial art."
The uniqueness of the Piraq Causa collection, when compared to the new Ayacuchan art on political violence, was its rather fixed focus on the local community of Sarhua. Artists, activists, and others who were familiar with Ayacuchan art never failed to point out that Sarhuino artists painted "only Sarhua." The strong emphasis on the village meant the artists did not represent events of national scope or conceptual themes. At the same time, the use of folk art as a means to denounce violence and condemn human rights violations positioned the Piraq Causa beyond local, regional, and national boundaries and within the global community. The collection had been part of one exhibit in Costa Rica and four exhibits in the United States.
The Piraq Causa can be considered what Mary Louise Pratt has called "arts of the contact zone," produced within "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today" (1999:2). The "contact" perspective presupposes an experience of transculturation in which marginal groups appropriate and reshape materials and forms belonging to a dominant culture. Some resulting works, such as the Sarhuino paintings, have taken the form of "autoethnography," texts or representations "others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations" (Pratt 1992:7). This is art that lives and plays within the confines of a presumably established art convention, but with a commitment to transgression for the creation of a "minor language" in the sense coined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1986). From this perspective, Sarhuino tablas pintadas might not reflect the language of a minority per se but rather entail a minor mode of exercising the language of a majority. Furthermore, in addressing the condition of marginality and domination of the Sarhuino community during the war, the Piraq Causa has political and collective value and gains its status as "minor art," following Deleuze and Guattari's characterization of a minority discourse.
Art has been used extensively as a means to resist authoritarian and oppressive regimes and to bear witness to traumatic experiences of war. The role art has played in society and for social movements, as a means to break the complicity of silence and to create a culture of resistance, is well known. In Latin America, the Piraq Causa is one example among many of how art was used to communicate the lived experience of terror and to denounce human rights abuses. As it was for the Chilean women making arpilleras (picture appliqués) to protest Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, generating an income while educating and gaining support from the international community was important for the ADAPS artists. However, different from the arpillera artists in Chile, the ADAPS was not part of a social movement and never engaged in organized activism with other Peruvian artists or human rights organizations. Neither did it manage to join an international circuit of solidarity groups or nongovernmental organizations that could provide them with a steady market for art related to issues of violence and human rights. This diminished the mobilization of resources for the "development" of the community of Sarhua that the artists had hoped for. Their international connections were limited to academics and artists who provided them with venues to show their work and educate foreigners on the situation of human rights in indigenous communities.
The colorful images of the Piraq Causa can make the viewer's initial encounter with painful events less shocking yet still inevitable. Allured into contemplating the deceivingly picturesque, the viewer is almost immediately confronted with the dissonant experience of war. Construed as the representation of the collective memory of Sarhuino people, the Piraq Causa stresses shared memories of war and the ways that violence affected the community as a whole. Maurice Halbwachs (1992) has convincingly argued that people are socialized through the family, religion, and social class, which all create "social frameworks" that provide a sense of shared experience and common history. During my fieldwork, references to communal practice, rituals, and myths binding Sarhuinos from in and out of the village sounded like a litany meant to re-create their sense of identity. Indeed Peruvian scholars with regional expertise have reckoned Sarhua as the "ideal" place for a study of memory. According to this perspective, in the late 1990s Sarhua apparently continued to be a real environment of memory, the kind of milieu de mémoire maintained by the presence of peasant culture, which French historian Pierre Nora would have nostalgically claimed as the "quintessential repository of collective memory" (Nora 1989:7).
The Piraq Causa, however, was also evidence of cultural transformations, both preceding and resulting from the war. The ADAPS artists' concerns about an increasingly deritualized Sarhua had given them the impetus to embody in their earlier artwork the traditions that they claimed were threatened by oblivion and essential to Sarhuino identity. The traditional genealogical paintings of the village, given as gifts to solidify reciprocal ties between compadres, were paradoxically used as a source of inspiration to produce art as a lieu de mémoire (Nora 1989), a site of memory, which might lack spontaneity but could have the rather noble responsibility of helping people to remember. The awareness of human rights abuses in indigenous communities contributed to the ADAPS artists' preoccupation with the materialization of memory in the pursuit of justice. Thus, they embarked on the recording of the violent events that affected their birthplace.
But in this "history from below" whose and what memories were being represented? Had the war affected all Sarhuinos in the same way? Had the war not tainted Sarhua with antagonism and conflict among its people? Did Sarhuinos not give different meanings to their experiences of the same event? Was it possible to claim a common memory through the Piraq Causa, or would it be just the illusion of one?
Halbwachs's concept of collective memory helps us understand that there are as many memories as social groups participating in any given society and that individual memories also respond to the same diversity of cultural and social codes. More important, he takes memory out of the confines of linear time to argue that society reconstructs the past from the perspective of the present. But it is Walter Benjamin (1969 [1940]) with his conceptualization of "the time of the now" who challenges the conventional temporality of historical knowledge, or in his words, "telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary" (1969 [1940]:263), and its production of "empty time." "The time of the now," "shot through with chips of Messianic time" (Benjamin 1969 [1940]:263) in which oppressed pasts leave their traces, remains critical of the present. Benjamin's understanding of history brings to light the importance of omitted or concealed pasts.
The "making of memory" is also the "making of silence," as historian Steve Stern (2004) has movingly shown in his study of Chileans struggling with both individual and collective memories of political violence under Pinochet's dictatorship. What is remembered cannot be studied without considering what is forgotten. French anthropologist Marc Augé has interestingly suggested that "oblivion is the life force of memory and remembrance is its product," conceived in "the same relationship as life and death" (2004:21, 14). His perspective resonates with Nietzsche's (1998 [1887]) "active forgetfulness" as a means conducive to making life more livable. Despite their differences, remembering and forgetting are forever intertwined (Benjamin 1969 [1929]; Ricouer 2004). As Argentine sociologist Elizabeth Jelin stresses, "Dealing with memories entails paying attention to remembrance and forgetting, to narratives and acts, to silences and gestures" (Jelin 2003:8). In giving a central role to forgetting, Jelin clarifi es that "oblivion is not an expression of absence or emptiness"; "rather, it is the presence of that absence, the representation of something that is no longer there, that has been erased, silenced or denied" due to various social and political circumstances (2003:17).
Not all silences are the same, and forgetting can be manifested in different ways—erasures, voids, distortions, exaggerations, secrets, lies, and so forth—but distinctions between these categories can sometimes be skin deep. The truth assigned to the hidden content might be the initial source of attraction to the investigator until he or she becomes aware that "the ideas and imaginings by which people disclose what should be made public, and how they should carry out concealing one narrative with another" (White 2000:11), can tell a great deal about pasts and presents. In Sarhua, public secrecy, that which is known but can't be articulated, was the disguise for social amnesia. But as anthropologist Michael Taussig (1999, 2003) has insightfully established, public secrecy is a mode of truth-telling that is produced in the tension between concealment and revelation; as such it is what he calls a "skilled revelation of skilled concealment."
As I immersed myself in the lives of Sarhuino people, dug through piles of documents and communal records, listened to stories told and retold, and looked more closely at the paintings, I became aware of what was not or could not be shared explicitly with outsiders. The more visible things became, the more noticeable was the aura of things invisible. Ultimately, the stories told in these pages are as much as possible about the visibility and invisibility of things as they were revealed to and hidden from me. The interplay of images opened and closed side doors that both enlightened and obscured my vision. In my fascination with what was masked, I engaged in what Taussig (1999) refers to as a "drama of revelation," the unmasking of what is "secretly familiar." Absorbed in Sarhua's public secrecy, I realized that secrecy is a form of circulatory narrative through which individuals can keep certain memories alive. In secrecy, I argue, contentious and traumatic memories solidify and lurk, awaiting the moment of the transgressive act of revelation.
This study is about the unveiling of secrets of war that pertain to the peasant community of Sarhua in Ayacucho, Peru. The secrets in question are linked to the period from 1981 to 1983, which Sarhuinos describe as the time of most intense violence there. The secrets identified take account of fratricidal violence, the community's initial endorsement of the Shining Path, the Peruvian military's encouragement to kill Shining Path militants, private revenge disguised as communal justice, and the surrender and pardon of some Sarhuino guerrillas. Central to Sarhua's public secrecy is the disappearance and supposed death of Narciso Huicho, a villager whose personal ambition and greed were thought by most Sarhuinos to have had no limits and to have shaped the community's history of political violence.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from UNVEILING SECRETS OF WAR IN THE PERUVIAN ANDES by OLGA M. GONZÁLEZ Copyright © 2011 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Illustrations: Maps, Table, Figures1 Introduction
Secret or Forgotten Memories?
The Making of the Ethnography
2 The Village and the Impact of Political Violence
Sarhua Llaqta: The Village of Sarhua and Its People
The Times of Danger
3 The Said and the Unsaid
An Unusual Visit
Intended Forgetfulness
Gossip
The Missing Image of the Disappeared Man
Envy
Ressentiment
Confession
The Power to Silence
4 The Production of “Truth”
Old and New Sarhuino Painting Traditions
Events, Blamed Actors and Time Sequence in the “Piraq Causa”
Absent Themes
Unexpected Viewers and the Question of “Truth”
The Role of Imagination
Traces of the Real
Relationship between the Image and the Text
Condensation, Exaggeration, and Accentuation
Symbolism
5 Social Disruption
The Threat of Individualism: An Inside Enemy
The Threat of Outside Enemies: A Call for Unity
A Threat to Abolish the “Varayoqkuna” System: A Sign of Disunity
6 A Familiar Secret
A Crucial Alliance
A Deferred Response
The Final Push
The Uprising
Capricho
The Expulsion
Sarhua Charged with Terrorism
Narciso Seeks Revenge
The Community’s Reaction
A Secretly Deserved Death
7 Ambiguous Realities
Narciso Appears in Dreams
Between the Visible and the Invisible
Qarqachas
Defiant Qarqachas
Condenados
The Condenado of Ranranizio
The Condenado of Aywiri
8 Behind the Visible
Another “Disappearance”
Secret 1: The Invisible Presence of the State
Secret 2: Communal Justice or Private Revenge?
Secret 3: The Community’s Endorsement of Justiniano andSendero
Secret 4: The Surrender and Pardon of Sarhuino Senderistas
9 Conclusions
Afterword Coda to an Investigation: New Findings and Old
Appendixes
Appendix A: The Piraq Causa Paintings
Appendix B: The General Law of Peasant Communities
Appendix C: Communal Meeting of November 30, 1996
Glossary of Terms and Acronyms
Notes
References