History Under the Weather: Political Transitions, Regimes of Animation, and the Dead in Postwar Andean Peru

Description

Isaias Rojas-Perez, an associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, will give a talk titled "History Under the Weather: Political Transitions, Regimes of Animation, and the Dead in Postwar Andean Peru" for the Program in Latin America, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies and the Department of Anthropology. Reception to follow.

Rojas-Perez explores how, in the everyday task of living with legacies and reverberations of mass atrocity, survivors engage with multiple and simultaneous folds of time. These appear to them not just as abstractions or intellectual objects, but as ongoing lived experiences that resemble atmospheres out of which they cannot simply escape at will. The presentation will suggest that Andean survivors' efforts to deal with the legacies and reverberations of state mass violence do not easily and straightforwardly conform neither to the time framework of the Peruvian necrogovernmental project nor to Andean agrarian cosmologies. Survivors thus introduce their own political and cultural specifications to what is already established in their efforts to deal with their dead in episodes of mass violence in novel ways and to write the history of state atrocity on their own terms.

To obtain the pre-circulated text, please email Casey Rastegar at cjacob31@jh.edu.