Book Review Excerpts
“What is it like for ordinary people to live through revolutionary violence and the state’s repression of that violence? This stunning book offers amazing and troubling insight into the lives of peasants in highland Peru who endured the revolutionary and increasingly violent movement of the Shining Path and the onslaught of soldiers seeking to ferret out and destroy it. Kimberly Theidon describes vividly, through powerful stories and quotes, what happened to the people caught in the conflict. Her rich, ethnographic account also describes resilience in the face of suffering, moments of joy and caring, efforts to rebuild and to forget. This is not simply a story of human suffering, but also one of endurance and recovery.”
— Human Rights Quarterly, February 2013, Sally Merry

“Kimberly Theidon’s hauntingly graceful book yields incredible insight into the embodied experiences of Quechua-speaking Andean campesinos (peasants) who suffered disproportionally during Peru’s civil war pitting Maoist guerillas (Sendero Luminoso, Shining Path), the state’s armed forces, and ronderos (armed communal watch patrols) in a gruesome conflict claiming over 70,000 lives and displacing more than 600,000. Fully steeped in anthropological theory and seamlessly woven to interdisciplinary considerations of localized worlds of morality, Intimate Enemies interrogates key jurisprudential notions through the optic of traumatized Quechua speaking communities. Intimate Enemies is a foundational monograph in the study and implementation of transitional justice. It represents a finely textured series of ruminations on the inevitable contradictions of Occidentalist postconflict reconciliation efforts that implore victims who find comfort in silence to publically enunciate their stories of suffering to establish perpetrators. Written for the specialist, as well as advanced undergraduate and graduate student audiences, Theidon’s book is a benchmark study of violence and social suffering.”
– American Ethnologist, February 2014, Bartholomew Dean

“Peru has been forever changed by the violence that swept its countryside during a civil war that began in 1980 and slowly ground to a halt in the 1990s after claiming nearly 70,000 lives. Kimberly Theidon has been studying the legacies of the violence. The fruit of that long study is a stunning new work of scholarship. Scholars of Peru, transitional justice, post-conflict societies, and medical anthropology will find much to admire in this book and will be forced to rethink some of the dominant paradigms in these fields. Of particular interest to scholars of transitional justice will be the sections dealing with how communities that largely rejected the Shining Path allowed some former rebels to return to or join their villages if they expressed regret, submitted to physical punishment, and participated in communal institutions like the rondas campesinas (village patrol groups). Though Peru held a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it is in the “micropolitics of reconciliation” in small communities across rural Peru that the real work of reconciliation is being done. Intimate Enemies is at times a troubling read, both for its unflinching attention to suffering and its tendency to sow doubt over established wisdoms. The disquiet it provokes is tempered by Theidon’s excellent writing, her ability to allow the voices of the people she is writing about to come through loudly and clearly, and the sense of solidarity her brand of engaged, participatory anthropology embraces.”
– Human Rights Review, Jan. 2014, Rebecca Root

“As late as 1991, the Shining Path Maoist guerrilla movement had seemed to threaten the survival of the elected Peruvian government. The insurgency gained control of rural areas through a combination of persuasion and coercion, writes the anthropologist Kimberly Theidon in Intimate Enemies, a somber study of war’s aftermath. Mistrust and resentment still infect Peruvian society, yet there has been little violent score-settling in recent years. Still, given the psychic scars Theidon describes, her extremely valuable and moving account shows that the end of war does not necessarily bring anything resembling peace.”
– The Times Literary Supplement, January 2014, Roger Atwood

“It is the extraordinary intermingling of the ‘before’ and the ‘after,’ as well as the place given to insurgent memory, that particularly sets Kimberly Theidon’s book apart. The work is innovative, challenging, and at times uncomfortable and unfailingly contains deft insight and reach. Theidon’s primary domain is anthropology, but its reach to the fields of international law and international human rights law with a particular interest in the gendered dimensions of armed conflict and post-conflict settings is unmistakable. Intimate Enemies is deeply theorized and has consistent intellectual force, but there is a taut line to the real world. Simple solutions are never offered, nor should they be, as one of her consistent strengths is to reveal density, as well as layered and conflicting realities. The book confirms on every page its dedication to a role of “committed witness.” It is the meticulous and forensic observation of the intimacy of death and harm in small and local places that marks this book out from other works addressing conflict-related violence and ruin.”
– Forthcoming, Tulsa Law Review Winter 2014, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin

“Kimberly Theidon’s Intimate Enemies, is one of the most moving and thought-provoking works of non-fiction I have read in a long while. Theidon wanted to know how ordinary people try to repair a social fabric that has been torn to shreds by extreme violence. What happened after the violence had stopped, with ex-Senderistas, current sympathisers, widows, orphans, rape survivors, and army veterans now having to live side by side? Theidon was also asking how moral discourse is embodied, and how people recovered access to emotions and sentiments, such as caridad, the compassion for fellow human beings, that were lost during the violence. She explored how Ayacuchanos, after years of dehumanising violence, once more attempted to learn how to be human. The politics of memory that characterise our époque have been largely shaped by attempts to come to terms with the Holocaust and the crimes of Nazi Germany. Truth commissions are now often modelled on what seemed to work well in South Africa. I am not arguing that we should ignore such precedents, but merely suggesting that more attention be paid to their historical and cultural contingency. In fact, much could be learned from Kimberly Theidon’s work in Peru.”
– Inside Story, Klaus Neumann, Dec. 2013

ntimate Enemies is a tour de force: it seamlessly blends a profound analysis of extensive conversations, interviews and observations conducted over a period of more than 15 years in villages and towns in the department of Ayacucho, the “cradle” of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), with the existing comparative literature on transitional justice, collective violence and medical anthropology. This research is presented through the lens of Theidon’s personal experience of being an “engaged anthropologist.” It is very difficult to account for mass violence without erasing the grey areas that exist between perpetrator and victim. It is also very difficult to do research among a traumatised and partly complicit population that is also marginalised from national political narratives and practices. Because Theidon does both these things, and does them well, her book is a key contribution to the growing body of literature examining the Peruvian conflict. Moreover, Theidon is also a great storyteller, and she is able to make a good read out of a long and harrowing story. Theidon’s book is a “must read” for anthropologists and analysts of mass violence, but also for all those concerned with transitional justice processes.
– Journal of Latin American Studies, November 2013, Jelke Boesten

Kimberly Theidon is an example of a new breed of anthropologist. Theidon’s interest in Shining Path began in 1987, when she first visited Peru as an undergraduate at the University of California Santa Cruz. The war was raging and it was a time of hyperinflation, curfews and blackouts – Santa Cruz soon stopped sending its students to Peru. But Theidon stayed long enough to be able to frame what she sees as ‘deceptively simple questions’ about the conflict: ‘how do people commit acts of lethal violence against individuals with whom they have lived for years? How can family members and neighbours become enemies one is willing to track down and kill?’ When Theidon returned to Peru in 1995, she began working with Quechua-speaking communities, wanting not just to find the answers to her questions but to ‘explore how people reconstruct individual lives and collective existence in the aftermath of war’. Theidon found Quechua methods for dealing with the aftermath of violence in some ways more sophisticated than those pushed by the trauma experts. A number of the Ayacucho communities she worked with subscribed to a process known as pampachanakuy, a ritual setting aside of aspects of the past in which two parties negotiate an agreement, then metaphorically bury their differences. She contrasts this with what she considers an uncritically accepted bromide: ‘more truth = more healing = more reconciliation.’ Theidon characterises this as ‘the tyranny of total recall’ and contrasts it with the more nuanced Quechua approach, which she describes as ‘remembering to forget’.”
— London Review of Books, Peter Canby

Intimate Enemies is an exhaustive life’s work…Theidon, who has had ties to Peru since 1987, collaborated with the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (PTRC) in order to understand the kinds of “memory projects” that transpired through the commission. Here Theidon explicates compelling points around narratives of violence, silence and locality. While acknowledging the potential value derived for the state and individuals of truth and reconciliation projects, Theidon nonetheless, with great care, considers the constraints that such projects institute – constraints that not only shape how one can speak of and to violence, but that limit the ways we might envision justice in the aftermath of violence. Intimate Enemies adds a much-needed contribution to scholars in political science, Latin American studies, and human rights. While her study is situated in the context of the Peruvian internal armed conflict, her conceptual contributions of rethinking truth projects, expanding justice, and re-evaluating the ethics of speech, narration and research extend well beyond Peru, truth commissions, and civil wars.”
– Law Culture and Humanities, Oct. 2013, Julietta Hua

“In Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru Kimberly Theidon brings testimonies and narrations that speak about gender, ethnicity, illness and health, pain, sorrow, as well as truth and hope in reconciliation amidst violence, poverty, and social discrimination. These narratives show the intricate ways of how memory works and how memory is loaded with meanings that appeal to the senses in many different ways. Theidon pays close attention to the heterogeneity of voices that are part of the “gray zones” left in rural Andean villages turned upside down by a traumatic recent past that is marked by a distant, dense, and conflictive historical relationship with the Peruvian State. As a result, this book is an important effort to understand post-conflict societies and their intentions to rebuild their social fabrics.”
— Anthropological Quarterly, Summer 2013, María Eugenia Ulfe

Theidon takes as her subject the community psychology and individual experiences of villagers who survived the destruction only to find that they then faced the enormous challenge of reconstructing meaningful lives together, frequently alongside those who had perpetrated humiliation, torture, rape or killing against them or their loved ones. Theidon’s writing is evocative and accessible, but sensitive to the harrowing stories she describes. Intimate Enemies will be of interest to anthropologists and others working in post-conflict areas or on community reconciliation, whether in Latin America or elsewhere in the world.”
— Anthropology in Action, Summer, 2013

“Kimberly Theidon explores the devastating impact of Peru’s prolonged civil war of the 1980s and 1990s, a conflict fought by Shining Path rebels, counterinsurgent state forces, and Andean peasants. Many Andean men and women participated in the Shining Path as militants, sympathizers, or forced recruits, while many others joined militarized peasant patrols to fight against the insurgents. Theidon examines community members’ experiences of extreme fratricidal violence, where perpetrators of political violence were often the brothers, cousins, and neighbors of their victims. She also explores the dynamics of communal reconciliation, investigating how community members have engaged local perpetrators of violence in the aftermath of the conflict. Theidon’s fine study is essential reading for scholars of Peru and for those interested in the legacies of political violence, truth commissions, and postwar reconstruction. Indeed, this study is one of the most important books in Andean anthropology published in the last decade.”
— The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History, vol 70(1), 2013. Jaymie Patricia Heilman

“What happened in Andean communities after the insurgency? Some community members, even those who had not fought with the Shining Path, had sympathized with it. Others, including army veterans and widows and orphans, had not. Kimberly Theidon, a medical anthropologist, describes their painful adjustments to coexistence. She shows that public confessions and apologies, healing rituals and storytelling, and degrees of punishment and reparation helped to “settle accounts.” More than any other scholar of Peru’s war, Theidon humanizes the legacy of the violence and indicates just how much the trauma still burdens Peru today.”
— Foreign Affairs, Feb 5th, 2013, Cynthia McClintock

“In her masterful ethnography of the legacies of violence in Ayacucho, Peru, Kimberly Theidon offers a critical intervention into discussions of post-conflict reconstruction and transitional justice. Intimate Enemies exemplifies hauntingly the power of the ethnographic method and demonstrates eloquently what anthropology can offer contemporary debates. At a time when universities and in particular social science departments are coming under attack for their lack of demonstrable worth, this work makes a vital case for importance of long-term, extended fieldwork and reflection.” — Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, November 2013, Winifred Tate