Looking To The Government

Resumen del Libro

This dissertation explores from a cultural and linguistic standpoint the political process in the relationship between the state and indigenous communities of Ayacucho, Peru, throughout the twentieth-century. I explore the vast world of sensibilities and meaning in the social interactions of daily life as well as in the process of remembering and representing the past. I historicize the immediate memory of the Shining Paths violence, the Maoist movement that started a peoples war in 1980, within the larger history of the Peruvian 20th C., overlapping and juxtaposing different layers of memories stemming from the past as well as the present. I emphasize the production of silences and secrets as the central dynamic of the production of memory. I also seek to understand peoples ideas of the state and the government as ingrained in the political process and in the struggles against the Hacendados Law and as a constant process of looking to the government. I see in this process an incomplete and constantly ruptured articulation of this population to the state, exposing the relationship between the process of nation-state formation and transformation, and colonialism as a global process of domination, which lies at the heart of twentieth-century politics in Peru.