Seminarium naukowe 25.10.2022: Rethinking indigenous agency in post-conflict Peru: Ashaninka experiments on peace and reconciliation

We invite you to Research Seminar of the Departament of Anthropology and Ethnology of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, room 2.122.

MS Teams https://tinyurl.com/pe5d2rch

October, 25

Guilherme Bianchi

Rethinking indigenous agency in post-conflict Peru: Ashaninka experiments on peace and reconciliation

Reconciliation is a keyword in the Peruvian Amazon today, as during the internal armed conflict (1980-2000) some local indigenous individuals fought on the side of Maoist guerilla Sendero Luminoso, while others choose to defend their communities or collaborate with the National Army. It is not uncommon then to hear about indigenous killing each other, or the conflict being described as a war between intimates. My aim is to demonstrate, based on the experience of the Ashaninka people, why indigenous demands and practices of reconciliation (from the past and the present) matters if we are to approach contemporary dilemmas of peace studies and transitional justice by taking seriously the political and epistemological claims of indigenous people. Ashaninka historical agency, I argue, should be comprehended in a complex and open way, paying particular attention to the (cosmo)political negotiations they had and have to carry out to integrate their worlds into the new worlds of colonialisms. The task, in the intersection between indigenous history and post-conflict studies, is to move the history of a conflict from a liability to a resource in conflict resolution — to imagine the engagement of the memory of past conflicts as an opportunity to develop mechanisms of acknowledgment and reciprocal recognition in the present.

Guilherme Bianchi holds a PhD in History from the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto (UFOP), Brazil. He has experience in the areas of theory of history and indigenous history. He currently conducts archival research on the history of the Peruvian Amazon with a scholarship at King’s College London and Canning House Library. He was a visiting researcher at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2018) and at the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis (2019).

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