Mourning Remains is a welcome contribution to studies of Peru’s postwar period and to the ongoing reckoning with what some scholars have called Peru’s “time of fear.” It shifts attention to a topic that remains insufficiently explored: the disappeared and the dead. The book focuses on the different ways the state and its agencies, on the one hand, and relatives of the disappeared, on the other, reckon with the dead, specifically in the context of mass exhumations.
Perhaps not surprisingly, they do so very differently. The state and state agencies, such as the judiciary and the Instituto de Medicina Legal, view exhumations from a legal and bureaucratic perspective as a step toward establishing a forensic truth that can serve as the basis for pursuing justice. As such, the state’s primary concern is, as Rojas-PØrez puts it, “the fabrication of corpses.” By contrast, the relatives of the dead, and in particular their mothers, reckon with the dead in ways that manifest a different epistemology of death, a way of thinking about the dead that resignifies the remains of their loved ones in ways that Rojas-PØrez views as culturally specific; by, for example, conveying agency on them and establishing their “ubiety.”
In an early chapter, Rojas-PØrez puts forward a critique of the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación’s (2001–3) politics of exhumation of mass graves and reburial in certain communities in Ayacucho, the region most impacted by the violence. He is particularly critical of the way these practices served what he views as the CVR’s moral project to deal with the dead of the conflict as victims, in a manner consonant with transitional justice prerogatives, and in so doing inserted them into its broader “depoliticized narrative” (44). As Rojas-PØrez notes, the communities did not always accept the imposition of such categories and proffered their own: the dead were “heroes.”
Rojas-PØrez’s critique extends to claiming that the CVR produced an “officially sanctioned” truth. This may surprise many observers of Peru’s postconflict politics. No government since 2003 has embraced the CVR’s “truth.” In fact, all have questioned its veracity and have contributed, through their failure to endorse the CVR, to a broader climate, stoked particularly by fujimorismo, right-wing groups, and sectors of the Catholic Church, that undermines its legitimacy. As a consequence, the CVR’s truth is no longer official, if it ever was, but instead is the usable truth of human rights groups and some victim-survivor associations and, in broad strokes, of the left. In this context, it is difficult to accept that the CVR’s narrative is “depoliticized.”
Most of the book, however, is concerned with exhumations that have taken place since the end of the CVR’s mandate, and focuses primarily on Los Cabitos, a former military base in the city of Ayacucho, where the armed forces tortured and killed detained people, burned their bodies, and buried their remains. In his analysis, Rojas-PØrez draws on a range of critical theorists, from Deleuze and Guattari to Judith Butler, but frames his study primarily within Foucauldian biopolitics. He develops and extends concepts derived from this specific analytical framework in useful ways. In particular, he introduces the notion of necrogovernmentality, a notion that complements Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropower, the sovereign’s prerogative to kill.
Necrogovernmentality helpfully captures and conveys the ways states attempt to “govern” the dead. Rojas-PØrez sees necrogovernmentality as operating at three levels: directly on dead bodies, which need to be localized, exhumed, examined, and generally accounted for; on territory, which is resignified and, indeed, reinstated as a space of state territoriality through the actions of the state on loci of such mass graves; and finally on language, introducing a specific vocabulary about the dead drawn from human rights law and humanitarianism to make sense of the violent past. This notion and the analytical work that it does throughout the book is a significant contribution, from which others who study similar processes may well benefit.
Perhaps surprisingly, since the author conducted extensive fieldwork over two years in Ayacucho, the mode of analysis that dominates is textual exegesis. Most chapters are extended discussions of typically short texts, vignettes, or reported speech, even particular words used by the author’s informants or, indeed, a woman’s cry of anguish. While the analysis that results is insightful, this methodological choice produces an unintended effect: the ethnographic dimension is thinned out, and the informants come across as archetypes. Indeed, we learn remarkably little about the informants (who, as it happens, are members of ANFASEP, an organization set up by women in Ayacucho in the 1980s to look for the disappeared, though oddly little is made of this) or their communities. The mothers whom Rojas-PØrez listens to and reports on come across less as individuals with specific stories and experiences than as interchangeable producers of speech acts that offer themselves up to the author’s analysis.
This perception is strengthened by the tendency to present these informants as somehow representative of “Andean people.” The “Andean” or “Quechua” in this book is problematically left unpacked in a manner that smacks of essentialism; see “it is believed in the Andes,” 75—the passive voice in this instance reinforces this impression—and not least in chapter 2, where the author uses the suicide of a single individual to put forward an ontology of death in the Andes.
Also problematic is that the book sets up a strict binary between, on the one hand, “the state,” legal and bureaucratic in nature, and its prerogative to fabricate corpses and, on the other, the Andean or Quechua mothers, and by extension (we are led to understand), “Andean peoples” and their challenge to that prerogative. This binary is problematic because it flattens the categories that conform it. In the book, the state appears both in the shape of soldiers and, by extension, the “state terror” (245) that disappeared the sons and daughters of the mothers; and in the shape of the legal and forensic experts who are tasked with “fabricating” their bodies. This is, therefore, a very capacious (and oddly untheorized) state but also primarily one that is imagined as fundamentally external, indeed alien and alienating, to the mothers.
This contradicts, for example, much work that has been done on the use that people in the Andes have made of courts, from the colonial period onward. In a discussion that begins with an anecdote about how human remains at Los Cabitos were discovered after a drunken man alerted the forensic scientists to their existence, Rojas-PØrez writes, “it is as if, in the Andes, you have to be drunk to speak truth to the law.” Undeniably, the law in Peru “has historically played a crucial role in maintaining and reproducing a [hierarchical structure of power]” (94). But to view the law as something that people in the Andes can approach only in a state of limited consciousness is at odds with the ample record of historical legal engagement.
Similarly, it is not always clear who are the “Andean” or “Quechua” people that Rojas-PØrez views as capable of constituting, in Foucauldian terms, a “people” distinct from “the population”; that is to say, of constituting themselves as subjects of politics and not mere objects of the state power. At times, he provides some greater specificity, such as when he explains, in the afterword, that “Quechua-speaking survivors in particular and rural villagers in general will find ways to inhabit these new spaces and articulate their own projects of justice and political and historical reckoning with atrocity and mass violence” (255). But Rojas-PØrez appears to assume that such projects must necessarily reflect, indeed originate from, an ontology specific to Andean or Quechua-speaking peoples, as he makes evident in his analysis of the mothers’ speech acts. Perhaps they do, or perhaps they should. But as a consequence of this approach, the book seems at odds with the work of scholars such as Ponciano del Pino, Jaymie Heilman, and Miguel La Serna, among others, who have shown how people in the Andes have experienced and made sense of the internal armed conflict and its legacies in ways that cannot be explained by reference to their Andeanness, a questionable category anyway, but that are both varied and contextually specific.
In short, Mourning Remains sheds important light on a topic that has received too little attention and puts forward an analytical approach to studying how the state governs the dead that many will find both attractive and helpful. At the same time, the book raises epistemological questions that connect to broader debates about the ontological turn in anthropology and the critiques that this literature has elicited around essentialism and indigeneity. In this sense, Rojas-PØrez has written a book that is at once a theoretically ambitious and yet grounded inquiry and an intervention in one of the major debates in the social sciences. Scholars working in very different fields, from modern Peruvian politics to transitional justice to the anthropology of death and dying, will find much of interest in this book.
