A world turned upside down can be taken literally when working with Andean communities, in which the concept pachakuti extends back to the time of the Incan empire. Pacha is a Quechua word meaning earth, time, and space, and kuti refers to overturning something or turning it back. Pachakuti is part of a millennial understanding of time and space, in which one world dramatically ends and another begins. For instance, recall the gentiles who were punished with a rain of fire for being corrupt, envious, and sinful. They were punished collectively, as a people, and their time on this earth came to an end. This historical consciousness endures, albeit under a different guise. Villagers lamented that they had become envious and hateful; that family members and neighbors were sinful; and that corruption reigned. Taken together, these signs meant the Apocalypse was at hand, and the fact the plagakuna and devil’s children walked this earth confirmed its imminence.
For Quechua speakers, there are three pachas, interacting yet distinct. Kay pacha is “this world,” the physical world we apprehend and traverse. It also constitutes a middle world lying between the hanan pacha (upper world, traditionally home to various deities) and the uku pacha (the lower or inner world, home to the wicked).18 For the Spanish colonizers and their missionary legions, these three worlds were glossed as earth, heaven, and hell.
Although these three dimensions of time and space have always intermingled, the sasachakuy tiempo threw these pachas into disorder. The uku pacha is normally invisible to the living and cloaked in darkness, with spirits that may emerge at night and frequent people’s dreams. However, as we see in the two conversations above, people were terrified as day and night blurred to the point of being indistinguishable and the underworld appeared in all its stench. During the sasachakuy tiempo it was this world (kay pacha) that was hellish. Magnifying the hellish aspects were the changes in norms and in moral codes, summed up by the passage from Matthew 24: “The mother will kill her children and the children will kill their mother.” Family members and neighbors were killing each other, and many times people insisted the killing began because the Devil himself had grabbed them—or spawned them. This was a cosmic disorder.
The rituals that gave meaning to life were also interrupted and, confronted with so much death, people were unable to hold wakes or bury their loved ones properly, which had implications for the fate of their souls. They died a “bad death,” which has repercussions in the lives of their loved ones.19 Their clothes were also taken, so there was no way to tend to their souls and send them on their way to another dimension of time and space. Thus the unburied dead can become a danger to the living, either by beckoning them to follow or by placing demands from beyond. Additionally, qala (the Quechua word for “naked”) has been used to describe mestizos and gringos—beings who are not runakuna, not “people like us.” The emphasis on nakedness invokes bodies made strange, bodies rendered less than fully human.
In Ayacucho, what is termed “popular religion” played a key role both in implementing the violence and in coping with its aftermath. Bible stories have been a key semiotic resource for people confronted with “limit experiences” and have offered a language to express altered life and the rupture with reality. Religious imagery offered damnation and salvation amid a period of violence people commonly explained as a sign of grave spiritual disorder, a result of humankind’s sins and Dios Tayta’s retribution. When the outbreak of war is understood as grave spiritual disorder—as in part a question of sin and punishment—then religious signifiers may become the reiterative images of both collective madness and its superation. The concept of collective madness condenses this spiritual, moral, and political collapse and reminds us that long before madness was defined as a medical or psychological problem, it was understood to be a spiritual phenomenon.
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When I arrived in Ayacucho in 1994, I arrived in a space full of stories, many oddly familiar to me. I was enveloped in The Greatest Story Ever Told, at times thumbing through a copy of the Bible to see what might happen next or to remind myself how a particular story might end. There is much more to be said about the Evangelical Christianities people elaborated in the context of the internal armed conflict and its aftermath. This discussion involves theologies of war and of reconciliation, involves the religious imagination and its creative exercise.20 I agree with Daniel Philpott that “more attention to local and community level faith-based actors who help populations deal with the past would fill an important gap in our knowledge of religion and transitional justice.”21 We begin with one of the first Quechua-speaking pastors to travel throughout rural Ayacucho. He recounted the history of Evangelismo during the many hours we spent in his Clinic of the Soul.
Chapter 4
Fluid Fundamentalisms
In many rural communities, the [Evangelical] churches were the only social organizations that did not dissolve, but rather resisted and stood their ground. Faced with the totalitarian, violent message of the subversive groups and the horror, the faith that animated these churches led them to elaborate diverse responses: from not complying with the call to arms, to the articulation of a theological reflection with which they lived daily life, to those who decided to fight against the terror of Shining Path by forming the rondas campesinas. In all cases, they were the response of native leadership given that the majority of the foreign missionaries had to withdraw from these areas, leaving the direction of these churches in the hands of local pastors and lay people.
—PTRC, Final Report, 2003
IT WAS ABOUT nine in the morning when I headed to the óvalo in search of a taxi to Huanta. The óvalo is a transportation hub, with taxis, vans, buses, and the occasional bicyclist departing for destinations throughout Peru. The first combis (vans) to the selva (jungle) had already left, and the crew of the next combi out was still loading passengers and cargo when I passed by. The roof rack was piled high with boxes, burlap sacks, suitcases, and backpacks, but a young man was still optimistically squeezing in a few more boxes before securing the load with rope. The passengers had opened the windows despite the brisk morning air, perhaps thinking ahead to their twelve-hour ride into the fly-buzzing heat of the selva.
Shiny streaks of gasoline floated on puddles left from the previous night’s rain. I dodged them as I crossed the street to a row of cars parked at odd angles. Children began coming by, carrying small cardboard boxes with carefully arranged rows of gum, candy, and bottled beverages for sale. Several women had cranked up kerosene stoves to the side of the parking lot, and sizzling chicharrones were sputtering in oil.
The sun warmed the streets and the puddles turned to vapor. The driver of the car stationed first in line was calling out, “Huanta, Huanta!” to the people milling about. One by one we accumulated the requisite five passengers, and the radio was blasting huaynos as we headed out to the “Emerald of the Andes.” In every direction there are valleys, some lush green and others streaked with layers of red and brown rock. Those valleys line up one after another until the sky ends.
An hour later the taxi pulled into the town plaza, and we each paid our five soles for the ride. I walked down to the Sunday market, bending over to dodge colorful sheets of plastic tied to sticks with webs of twine. This patchwork sheltered produce, cheese, herbs, flowers, and a wide assortment of potatoes. The merchants, mostly women, were sitting in their stalls on upside-down plastic buckets or old wooden crates, carrying on lively conversations in Quechua with customers as well as each other.
I had come to Huanta in search of Vidal Trujillano, one of the firstgeneration Evangelical pastors who figured into many conversations with comuneros in the highlands. I was interested in the history of Evangelismo (Evangelical Christianity), one of the most important social movements in the department of Ayacucho. From the U.S. missionaries who arrived in the 1940s, established the Bible Institute in Huanta, and founded Radio Amauta, to the local theologies developed by Quechua-speaking pastors, tracing this history adds to the familiar stories of evangelical growth and conversion by capturing the multiple theologies people have developed both during war and in its aftermath, exploring a phenomenon