and malafekuna (the people of bad faith/bad conscience), ceasing to be people. Mutability is a resource: enemies who at one time had “fallen out of humanity” can convert into people again, seeking reentry into the community of humankind.
An Emotional Education
In the alturas of Huanta, many people experienced the sasachakuy tiempo as a cultural revolution—an assault on a way of life, shared meaning, symbols, and moral codes. Tumultuous upheavals may provoke explicit discussions regarding the content of culture as individuals engage in the everyday work of social reconstruction. There was tremendous talk about who people had been—individually and collectively—before and during the violence, as well as what sort of people they would be now. This talk was part of remoralizing the world: redefining cultural norms and managing affect was one component of these discussions.
Richard Shweder and E. J. Bourne suggested the term “sociocentric” to refer to cultures that value interconnectedness among people.6 From this perspective, we are who we are because of the social relations that define us, that give us our identity—an identity that changes according to the social context. Psychological theories predicated upon the bounded, sovereign individual have limited applicability when working with groups whose life is more oriented toward the collective. The atomized individual is neither the developmental goal nor the norm within Quechua-speaking communities, and individual members of the community will be reminded in many ways that the collective good takes precedence over individual interests.
An important part of one’s emotional education includes kuyachicuyta yachana (learning how to make others love you). Love is something one must inspire or generate in another person rather than being a “natural” or latent emotion just looking for an object upon which to focus. For example, women were candid: some children knew how to make their mothers love them, and others did not.7 A mother’s love was not unconditional but rested in great measure upon a child learning how to be lovable and to act in such a way as to elicit that emotion.8
With kuyachicuyta yachana, boys and girls (and adults in rituals such as weddings) learn and are reminded of the centrality of exchange in social relations, as well as the importance of conflict-avoidance mechanisms. The capacity to produce positive emotions in another person is a sign of maturity in a face-to-face context in which retributive emotions are disruptive and potentially dangerous.9 Rather than a concept of the self that places value on the degree of separation achieved from others, solidarity and interconnectedness are valued. And this solidarity and coexistence require a continual effort to maintain them. As Catherine Allen has noted, there are few channels in daily life for the direct expression of negative emotions; even brief interactions among runakuna are marked by elaborate expressions of mutual esteem.10 “Harmony ideology” functions on the interpersonal and communal levels, cloaking perpetual conflict in a florid idiom of courtesy.11
One component of this relational model is a high level of permeability between the interior and the exterior. Rather than a model of the human being with a clearly defined internal world, there is tremendous fluidity between the social environment and the person. For instance, several curanderos explained how they cure susto. One effective treatment is qayapa, which consists of repeatedly calling the patient’s soul, requesting that it return. Calling the soul is complemented by identifying the place in which the person suffered susto and taking an article of the patient’s clothing to that spot. The soul, upon recognizing the clothing, “sticks” to it and can thus be reunited with the person. The clothing beckons to the soul. The theory that clothing carries something of the person’s essence also plays a role in mourning and rituals of death. For Dionisia, the bits and pieces of her son’s clothing strewn throughout the house made it impossible to forget the horror of his death and his distant burial. Gathering the clothing into a sealed sack was to alleviate her lacerating memories. More generally, after someone dies the soul of the deceased remains present, revisiting the sites frequented during the person’s life. On the fifth day following the death, family members of the deceased wash his or her clothing so the soul can begin its journey to heaven. If the clothing is not washed, the soul cannot free itself and will continue wandering this earth without finding peace; during this transitional phase, the wandering soul is potentially dangerous to the human beings it encounters. For a year following someone’s death, his or her clothing is stored in a folded shawl (manta). Once the year of mourning is finished, family members open the shawl and distribute the clothing the soul has left behind.
Clothing is also important for practicing the witch’s craft. Because an article of clothing carries the person’s essence, having it helps the witches more effectively cast their spells. The power of this was made clear when people in the highlands of Huanta described how they burned the clothing of the Senderistas they had killed: those flames finished off the terrucos. The essence of the person extends beyond their skin; the surface of the skin does not mark the person’s bodily boundaries. That which is inside and outside are connected, and a human being is primordially defined by his or her mutable social environment. This is a thoroughly “social body.” Madness is social as well.
Madness
We were like crazy people [loca qina karaniku]. We went around like crazy people then. There was so much death! It was like another life [huk vida].
—Juliana Morales, Hualla, April 2003
If indeed llakis constitute the most common category of suffering, they find their complement in two expressions that dominated conversations about the sasachakuy tiempo: “We were like crazy people” (loca qina karaniku) and “as though we were in a dream” (muspaypi qina karaniku).12 We begin with two conversations about madness, attuned to how figures of madness emerged within the context of the internal armed conflict and its aftermath. The discourse of madness is a domain of knowledge that can tell us a great deal about intimate violence, cosmic upheaval, and moral transgression.
Dulia and I were talking with mama Zenaida one morning when someone registered in my peripheral vision.13 It was a tall woman whose hat was adorned with flowers of various colors, and she was heading toward us. Her determined stride sent the layers of her blue skirts swaying back and forth. She stopped in front of me: “Are you the people who are gathering testimonies about the violence?”
Dulia nodded. “Yes, we are.”
She expressed her interest in talking with us, and mama Zenaida quickly excused herself and left. Her reaction was perplexing. Normally she was very friendly. I asked the woman standing before me, “What happened? Why did she act that way with you?”
Victoria looked up and down the street to see if anyone was watching us. Then she replied, “There are people here who’re afraid of me because of my husband. But we can’t talk here—I’m afraid. Come to my house and there we can talk woman to woman.” She insisted we visit her that same afternoon.
We went to her house later that day, and one of her children let us in. At the back of the room Victoria was seated with her children and grandchildren, who continued playing boisterously while we talked. She offered us sheepskins so we could sit beside her and began to talk while we threshed corn. She seemed quite anxious, her words tumbling out as quickly as possible. Over and over again she insisted, “I suffer so much. The violence left us poor. We were going to have work, the schools were going to improve—but when this problem began everyone left, even SINAMOS [a government agency]. Where did they go? That’s how it was.”
“And now—are these things still lacking, mama Victoria?” I asked.
“Yes, but hopefully they’ll come back.” She shrugged before adding, “If Dios Tayta wants them to return, then they will. In Matthew [chapter] 24, Dios Tayta says, ‘The mother will kill her children, and the children will kill their mother.’ That’s how it will be when it’s the end of time [tukupay tiempupi]. That’s how it will be when time runs out. That’s what God wanted.”
“So it was a time of killing among families, neighbors?” prompted Dulia.
“Yes,”