Dr Guilherme Bianchi (Brazil) - a visiting scholar at the King's College, London, on Tuesday, 25 October 2022 at 9:30-11:oo in the Department of Anthropology and Ethnology AMU (ul. Uniwersytetu Poznańskiego 7, Morasko), room 2.122 (sala im. Józefa Burszty), will hold a guest seminar on "Rethinking indigenous agency in post-conflict Peru: Ashaninka experiments on peace and reconciliation."
Rethinking indigenous agency in post-conflict Peru:
Ashaninka experiments on peace and reconciliation
Abstract:
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.
Seminar Readings:
Guilherme Bianchi, "Persistent pasts in Peruvian Amazon: temporal clashes and justice among the Ashaninka of the Ene river (1980-2017)". História da Historiografia: International Journal of Theory and History of Historiography, vol. 11, no. 28, 2018: 166-194.
Kimberly Theidon, "Justice in transition: The micropolitics of reconciliation in postwar Peru." Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 50, no. 3, 2006: 433-457.
Fernando Santos-Granero, “The Sisyphus Syndrome, or the struggle for conviviality in Native Amazonia”. In: Overing, Joanna. & Passes, Alan. The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia. Routledge: London, 2000.
Guilherme Bianchi
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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