I am a medical anthropologist focusing on Latin America. I first visited Peru in 1987. At that time I was an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz. With a small grant from the chancellor's fund, I headed to Peru in part to research Shining Path, the guerrilla organization that had launched its war on the Peruvian state seven years earlier. I squeaked in just months before the university shut down its study abroad program there, concerned about the safety of students amid the political violence that convulsed the country. I did not attempt to visit Ayacucho, the region that Abimael Guzmán--founder of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path)--called the "cradle" of the revolution. The guerrillas espoused a fervent anti-imperialist ideology, and the United States was on their list of enemies. Besides, by 1987 the violence extended well beyond the highlands of Ayacucho, and soon nearly half the population lived under a state of emergency, subject to the control and caprice of the Peruvian armed forces. This was a civil conflict. It was Peruvians killing Peruvians, some in army uniforms, others in guerrilla attire, and many more in the clothes they wore every day when they planted fields, waved to neighbors, walked their children to school, or brought their animals into the safe harbor of a family's corral. Some deceptively simple questions stayed with me across the years. How do people commit acts of lethal violence against individuals with whom they have lived for years? How can family members and neighbors become enemies one is willing to track down and kill? But it was not just the violence that gave rise to questions. More was at stake here. There was no invading army that would gather up weapons and return to some distant land. Not this war. When the killing stopped, former enemies would be left living side by side. What would happen then? My research past and present has been an attempt to answer those deceptively simple questions. My first book was Entre Prójimos: El conflicto armado interno y la política de la reconciliación en el Perú (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. 1st edition 2004; 2nd 2009), and my second book was Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012 and 2014). Intimate Enemies has been reviewed in London Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, American Ethnologist, The Times Literary Supplement, Journal for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Human Rights Quarterly, The Americas: Quarterly Review of Latin American History, Anthropology in Action, Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of Latin American Studies, Law, Culture and the Humanities, Inside Story, ReVista, Tulsa Law Review, Hispanic America Historical Review, Journal of Anthropological Research, PoLar: Journal of Political and Legal Anthropology, and Revista Andina, forthcoming. Intimate Enemies was awarded the 2013 Honorable Mention from the Washington Office on Latin America-Duke University Libraries Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, and the 2013 Honorable Mention for the Eileen Basker Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology for research on gender and health. I am currently writing two books. The first is "Pasts Imperfect: Working with Former Combatants in Colombia," based on my research with former combatants from the paramilitaries, the FARC and the ELN. I am also completing "Sex at the Security Council: Towards a Greater Measure of Justice," an ethnography about reparations, gender and justice. I completed my appointment as the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University in June 2014. During the 2014-2015 academic year, I will be a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C, and will then begin my appointment as the Henry J. Leir Professor of International Humanitarian Studies at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. For more information, please visit my website: www.kimberlytheidon.com
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