Abstract
In this dissertation I explore how violence and ethical reflections shape the stories people tell to make sense of the historical experience of social conflict. Set in a frontier region on the eastern foothills of the central Peruvian Andes, my thesis examines narrative modes broadly conceived that tell about, conjure up and recreate the past following a two-decade period, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, when the illicit trade in raw cocaine dominated the regional economy. This cocaine boom overlapped with the armed insurrection of the Maoist Shining Path. As ethnography, my dissertation seeks to convey the lived reality of the scarred and not-yet-peaceful social landscape of the late-nineties, when memories of the heady and destructive energies of recent history weighed heavily upon everyday experience. While describing the quotidian dimensions of political emergency, I analyze how violent acts are both implicated in the creation of laws and drawn upon to craft a sense of time, whether to mark distinctions between conditions current and past or to trace out horizons of expectation.
