LACWG: Sovereignty in Ruins: Necropower, Necro-governmentality, and the Figure of the People in Peru
El Latin America and the Caribbean Working Group invita a la presentación Sovereignty in Ruins: Necropower, Necro-governmentality, and the Figure of the People in Peru’s post-war Andes(ver abstract abajo) A cargo de Prof. Isaías Rojas-Pérez, Associate Professor. Department of Sociology and Anthropology - Rutgers University-NewarkEl próximo miércoles 27 de mayo a las 4:00 PM (PST). La presentación será en español. Q&A en inglés y español.** Por favor RSVP aquí para recibir el link de Zoom y el texto que servirá como base para la conversación **
In 2009, the Peruvian legal authorities completed a six-year forensic archaeological investigation at Los Cabitos, the former regional headquarters of the 1980s and 1990s counterinsurgency campaign in Peru’s central southern Andes. This investigation uncovered dozens of clandestine mass graves containing the shattered remains of an unknown number of “disappeared” suspects during Peru’s “war on terror” and the foundations of demolished furnaces where the Peruvian military presumably burned their victims’ bodies in an attempt to dispose of them without a trace. In July 2011, Quechua mothers of the disappeared erected a plain cross of cement at the site, in memory of their missing relatives. Through an ethnographic examination of the physical markers these different interventions left behind, this paper considers the question of sovereignty in the aftermath of state atrocity. It introduces the notion of “necro-governmentality” to conceptualize a form of power that, by means of governing dead bodies, seeks to structure the field of action and speech of survivors and society at large as free subjects in order to govern how the recent past of violence should be reckoned with. This form of power stands in opposition term by term to “necropower”— a term Mbembe (2003) coined to argue that biopolitics ultimately manifests itself in the power to create “death-worlds.” Specifically, the paper examines the political significance of the Quechua mothers’ gesture. While post-atrocity technical, expert and modern political processes tend to exclude them, these women assert their primacy in matters of death and attempt to hold the state to account by mobilizing cultural grammars that govern the thresholds within which Andean peoples test what a human form of life is. In doing so, these mothers make a claim on political community. The paper argues that this gesture evokes the figure of the people standing in its own right, as a response to both necropower and necro-governmentality, to show how the stakes in recovery from mass atrocity concern not just questions of rights or the rule of law but problems pertaining the weave of life as well as senses of community, belonging, authority, the human and non-human agency.