SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online

 
 issue67Symbolic reparation, trauma and victimization: The response of the Chilean State to human rights violations (1973-1990)Challenges and strains in the search for disappeared migrants from Honduras and El Salvador author indexsubject indexarticles search
Home Pagealphabetic serial listing  

Services on Demand

Journal

Article

Indicators

Related links

  • Have no similar articlesSimilars in SciELO

Share


Íconos. Revista de Ciencias Sociales

On-line version ISSN 1390-8065Print version ISSN 1390-1249

Abstract

DELACROIX, Dorothée. The presence of absence. Towards and anthropology of the posthumous life of the disappeared in Peru. Íconos [online]. 2020, n.67, pp.61-74. ISSN 1390-8065.  https://doi.org/10.17141/iconos.67.2020.4141.

The disappearance of people in Peru generates a sense of rupture in the rural Andes. It is a product of recruitment and armed conflicts between guerrilla groups and law enforcement agencies and paramilitary groups during the decades of 1980 and1990. This sense of rupture is regained through the continual presence of the absent, expressed in a particular concept of posthumous life which extends beyond the death of the person who has disappeared. Through field work and in-depth interviews, this article recovers the stories of those who live in places where death was not peaceful or properly ritualized, meaning, where death was not domesticated. In order to understand the ontological ambivalence of the figure of the disappeared, who is neither dead or alive, and the consequences of its liminality, this article exposes the religious traditional representations created and the repertory of rites maintained in Peru. Tormented souls, known pathologically as a product of folklore, have not been considered interpretative categories for understanding the experience of violence. Therefore, this research addresses the social meanings of these accounts as a contribution for understanding the impact of forced disappearances and the approaches of searching for victims and relating to them. This task is undertaken in order to reconstruct a sense that may fill to some extent the emptiness left by the disappearance of a loved one, prolonging and reactivating their social existence.

Keywords : souls; Christianity; Andean; forced disappearance; funeral rites; dreams.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )