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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography drawn from life stories, family photo archives, and photo elicitation, this paper analyzes how a microhistory of grief in Ayacucho reveals the interweaving of intimate experience, memory, and historical processes in post-conflict Peru.

Paper long abstract

Memories of violent pasts, necessarily partial and fragmented, constitute a field of dispute over the hegemony of historical truth, marked by silences, forgetfulness, and political polarization. These disputes not only reshape interpretations of the past, but also influence our understanding of the present and broader political dynamics. In this paper, I analyze the grieving experience of a family from Ayacucho during and after the internal armed conflict in Peru (1980–2000), focusing on the lack of state recognition they felt in relation to their loss and the strategies they deployed in the face of such indifference.

The family lost its youngest member, Víctor, a second lieutenant in the Peruvian Army, an institution that still faces serious allegations of crimes against humanity. Faced with this situation, the family develops forms of resistance that include negotiation and collaboration with actors linked to critical discourses on state violence, establishing a dialogue between historically antagonistic positions and showing how history becomes personal, while the personal intervenes in history.

From an ethnographic approach that combines family photo archives, life stories, and photo elicitation exercises, we examine how this family, motivated by affection, resists the marginal place assigned to it by the state, particularly through its efforts to include Víctor's name in the El Ojo que Llora memorial, which has been the subject of intense controversy. It is argued that these actions reveal processes of internalization, resistance, and re-signification of the social forces and temporalities that shape memory, grief, and social life in post-conflict contexts.