Isaias Rojas-Perez

I am currently developing plans for my second and third books in which I will continue my study of the complex relationships between sovereignty, governmentality, violence, material culture, and collective action in modern Peru. One will offer an ethnography of how a Peruvian Andean Quechua-speaking village inscribes the memory of mass death in the landscape and how, in turn, the state writes a memory of mass death for the village through its legal and forensic practices. The said village is Accomarca, in Ayacucho, Peru, in which the Peruvian army massacred 69 Quechua speaking peasants in 1985, during the counterinsurgency campaign against the Maoist Shining Path. This carnage has been usually portrayed in mainstream media as the Andean version of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War. I have written an expert report for the Peruvian courts on the socio-cultural impact of the mass killing. Also, two chapters of my book Mourning Remains draw heavily from my ethnographic work in the village. However, I have left most of the collected material for further elaboration in a book specifically focused on this event of state atrocity. I want to elaborate on the how objects, landscapes, and texts interact in these Andean communities’ efforts to constitute memory as a form of political weapon in their long-standing attempt to secure a relation of coexistence with an ever threatening and mercurial state-power.

The other book project, which I tentatively entitled “The Last Age of Innocence: Democracy, State Violence, and Human Rights in Neoliberal Peru,” is an ethnographic history aimed at documenting the ways contemporary human rights regimes have moved away from their origins in oppositional politics to become a political technology of “governmentality” invested in informing, measuring, monitoring, and advising state practices. As such, from the perspective of Quechua-speaking people, rather than emancipatory mechanisms, human rights appear to them as yet another civilizing project through which (Spanish-speaking) state power has historically sought to govern and uplift “unruly” indigenous subjects. In Peru, this transition started to occur early on during the internal armed conflict but intensified on the heels of the military defeat of two guerrilla groups (the Shining Path and the MRTA) and the neoliberal reforms of the early 1990s implemented by the regime of former president Alberto Fujimori. For this book, in addition to an interviews with former and current human rights activists and fieldwork among people who were “beneficiaries” of state-sponsored human rights policies at the time, I plan to draw from my previous experience as professional human rights activist in Peru.

In the long term, I plan to complete a research project in the field of anthropology of law that seeks to expand my inquiry into the work of international human rights case law on cases of desaparecidos in Latin America.  By looking at the rulings of the Inter American Court of Human Rights, I am interested in understanding how practices of state terror and notions of national sovereignty have been reconciled in international human rights jurisprudence. Similarly, I seek to understand the legal languages through which the missing body is spoken of as well as how culturally situated categories such as “proper burial” are legalized through languages of international human rights law.

Finally, I also expect to start soon new projects in two areas of anthropological research I have been interested in for a long-time. The first is in the field of visual anthropology. Here, I seek to understand how Latin American cinema has dealt with the problem of representation of violence, terror and suffering. I am interested in exploring the ethnographic possibilities of feature films in terms of their potentiality for connecting everyday life, fiction and major historical events through the circulation of ordinary languages and epochal conversations through which people tell their experience in their world. In theoretical terms, I am interested in the problem of the intersections between image and perception, particularly in relation to the question of trauma and mechanical repetition of violence.

The second project deals with the impact of the “war on drugs” on Latin American democracy and human rights. I have written extensively on this topic in the past and have conducted preliminary fieldwork among the Apurimac River Valley coca growers in the Amazonian region of Ayacucho, Peru, in the early 2000s. I am interested in studying the intersections between the regimes of law, violence, and human rights in the production and circulation of suspicion as the defining form of presence of, and relation with, the state in its margins.