Paper short abstract:

This paper highlights the value of long-term participant observation within ethnography for understanding kinship and relations that produced political violence in Peru and shaped how local people and outside agencies struggled to promote (re)construction and ‘reconciliation’.

Paper long abstract:

Truth commissions are now familiar institutions set up to investigate contemporary global conflicts and promote peace and 'reconciliation' processes in 'new' and emerging democratic states. They have attracted the interests of a number of scholars, including anthropologists, who have applied their knowledge and expertise to the work of truth commissions and/or conducted ethnographies of them and the politico-legal discourses particular truth commissions have promoted. However, this paper will argue that these approaches have steered anthropologists away from conducting long-term participant observation within ethnography. Based on examples from research within a 'community' in the Andean highlands of Ayacucho, Peru, this paper will show that long-term participant observation within ethnography can shed light on a network of relations, and especially kinship relations that both produced political violence and shaped conflicted ways local people and intervening outside agencies struggled to (re)build community and promote 'reconciliation' in a contemporary context. The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission was one of these intervening outside agencies that this paper will argue could not encompass long-term participant observation within ethnography as a research method or engage with local forms of violence and 'reconciliation' in its project to promote national 'reconciliation'. The paper concludes by discussing the ways anthropologists go about 'doing ethnography' in order to contribute both to geopolitical debates on global conflicts and existing knowledge and discussions within the discipline of anthropology.