Overview

In The End of the Future, author Bartholomew Dean broadens the theoretical framework for understanding memory's role in reconciliation following a violent conflict. This book explores the complicated and confusing linkages between memory and trauma for individuals caught up in civil war and post-conflict reconciliation in the Peruvian Amazon's Huallaga Valley—an epicenter for leftist rebels and a booming shadow economy based on the extraction and circulation of cocaine. The End of the Future tells the story of violent attempts by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru, MRTA) to overthrow the state in the late 1980s and early 1990s from the perspective of the poorest residents of the lower Huallaga's Caynarachi Basin. To give context to the causes and consequences of the MRTA's presence in the lower and central Huallaga, this book relies on the written works and testimony of Sístero García Torres, an MRTA rebel commander; the government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; MRTA propaganda; media accounts; and critical historical texts. Besides exposing Huallaga Valley human rights abuses, the book's contribution to political anthropology is consequential for its insistence that reconciliation is by no means equivalent to local, Indigenous notions of ""justice"" or customary forms of dispute resolution. Without deliberately addressing the diverse socio-cultural contours defining overlapping epistemologies of justice, freedom, and communal well-being, enduring reconciliation will likely remain elusive.

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9780826506252

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Reviews

"""Chronicling the little-known yet gripping story of the MRTA rebels' war in the Peruvian Amazon with admirable humanity and tremendous insight, Dean shows how the horrors of what locals call those ""ugly times"" still haunt the living despite the pieties about healing and reconciliation."" --Orin Starn, co-author of The Shining Path: Love, Madness, and Revolution and the Andes"

Author Information

Bartholomew Dean is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas.

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