Book Review: Memories Before the State: Postwar Peru and the Place of Memory,Tolerance,and Social Inclusion

Abstract

What does it take for a conservative blowhard such as Aldo Mariátegui, a staunch critic of Peru’s human rights community and diehard opponent of post-conflict memory politics, to find an exhibition (produced by elements of that same community in a national museum of memory) to be unobjectionable, even ‘decaffeinated’ (p. 139)? What processes, consultations and compromises had to take place for Peru’s Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y Inclusión Social (Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion, hereafter the LUM) to not just open during a time of ongoing contestation over memories of Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980–2000), but to also achieve input and validation from diverse groups including victim-survivors, state actors, the country’s memory activists and artists, and representatives of the armed forces?

These are some of the questions asked and answered by Joseph Feldman in Memories Before the State, an insightful and engaging book with important lessons for scholars interested in the construction of post-conflict memory narratives in official and non-official spaces, and practitioners engaged in the production of similar institutions, as well as for those who work on processes of transitional justice and post-conflict memorialisation, in Latin America or globally. Memories before the State is a useful contribution to a growing literature on the construction of memory narratives in state-backed museums and memorial spaces (Hite, 2015; Hite and Collins, 2009; Kaiser, 2020), comparative and transnational approaches to studying post-conflict commemoration (Bilbija and Payne, 2011; Levey, 2016; Sodaro, 2018) and literature on how the politics and production of space influences and limits attempts to commemorate episodes of violence (Dwyer and Alderman, 2007; Milton, 2018; Schindel and Colombo, 2014; Willis, 2020).

Although some of the episodes and narratives have been related elsewhere, Feldman provides a comprehensive account of the LUM’s history from conception to the present day, and crucially places the political discourse surrounding the museum in the context of the more practical, everyday considerations of how the project came to be. The author skilfully demonstrates how the LUM is both produced by, and a producer of, transnational discourse on post-conflict memory construction, drawing attention to the museum’s international funding (p. 34) and comparative examples of national memory museums from around the world (p. 50), as well as how the LUM’s curatorial team have potentially influenced similar projects currently under construction (p. 143). Through chapters based around the LUM’s conception (including a brief summary of Peru’s internal armed conflict for non-specialists), the sub-national and transnational influences on Peruvian post-conflict discourse, the events that led the LUM to be conceived as a home to various memory narratives rather than a solely human rights focused museum, a detailed discussion on the LUM’s ‘participatory process’ and a summary of several controversies and developments since the LUM’s inauguration, Feldman leads us swiftly through the LUM’s not quite 20-year history and, more importantly, how ideas of who and what the LUM is for have changed over this period.

Feldman’s main contribution is to examine what happens when memory narratives and ‘contentious national histories’ (p. 20), especially those produced in the first instance from below by grassroots groups of activists and victim-survivors, come into contact with the state and become institutionalised through official attempts at memorialisation and reconciliation. Memories before the State therefore adds to the literature on the construction of official and non-official memory spaces in Peru (Milton, 2015, 2018; Sastre Díaz, 2015; Willis, 2018) and Latin America (Bilbija and Payne, 2011; Jelin and Langland, 2003; Levey, 2016) that go beyond studying the content of such spaces to also examine how architecture, funding limitations and conditionality, and emplacement within geographies of tourism, capitalism and urbanism have influenced each project. The book presents a convincing argument that this institutionalisation occurs, not through a simple and immediate excision of perspectives deemed unacceptable or overly critical to the state, but through a series of mediations and negotiations which served to ‘distribute accountability’ (p. 102) for the LUM’s content between numerous actors and interest groups. Feldman highlights that although this approach has not been without criticism from Peru’s memory activists and human rights community, it has given the LUM a degree of ‘discursive authority’ and acceptance as an ‘appropriate vehicle’ (p. 120) for the many various, and often competing, memory narratives on Peru’s internal conflict. Hence, the book is successful in its goal of providing an account of how memory interacts with and is mediated through state institutions, moving beyond critiques of the LUM which see it solely as a top-down, elite-driven institution.

Feldman’s ethnographic methodology also has two important implications for how we understand memory in, and about, the LUM. In an attempt to provide an account of the LUM’s ‘own historical and institutional trajectory’ (p. ix), much of the analysis is based on 72 formal interviews conducted in 2013 with LUM directors, curators and museographers, as well as human rights advocates, victim-survivors, members of the armed forces and scholars with varying degrees of engagement and participation in the LUM’s process. The sections focusing on progress made under two LUM Directors, Fernando Carvallo (pp. 45–62) and Denise Ledgard (pp. 101–120), and interviews with the museum’s curatorial team, reinforce the sense that post-conflict memory narratives are produced through constant battles and contestation between various groups (Stern, 2011). But crucially they also reveal how key decisions in the LUM’s construction (on guiding principles, the exclusion of a popular photography exhibit (pp. 63–79), which death toll estimates to use (pp. 107, 125–126)) were not always pre-determined by the state or the LUM’s High Level Commission, but were arrived at through a process of smaller decisions and consultations, and often influenced by the more mundane realities of the museum’s funding, architecture and location (although as discussed more below, that is not to say that such decisions were non-political or did not ultimately reflect the wishes of state representatives).

The second related insight, which is at times more heavily implied than explicitly explored by Feldman, is how a form of collective memory and series of foundational myths about the museum itself appears to emerge within the LUM team. This is clearest in analysis of the LUM’s ‘participatory process’ (pp. 103–120) undertaken by Ledgard, during which various stakeholder groups (the armed forces, victim-survivors, the human rights community) were consulted on the museum’s museographical script. Feldman demonstrates how this process achieved important buy-in and consent from these groups and contributed to the LUM’s ‘discursive authority’, but also highlights the reverential terms in which the curatorial team would describe the process. The LUM staff, he tells us, became adept at sharing insights from victims of violence or members of the armed forces in conversations with other groups, both to position themselves ‘above the fray’ (p. 116) of the contestations between different stakeholders, and also as a means of borrowing legitimacy for their own interventions. That is not to say that the process was set up as a merely tick-box exercise; the author’s exploration of how an entirely new museographical script was developed afterwards shows this not to be the case. But Feldman does show, in analysis that will be of most interest to scholars and practitioners engaged in similar projects of memory construction in so-called official and non-official institutions, that the participatory process served an important duel process for the LUM. While important for helping the team to gather feedback on their work, it also gave the LUM an institutional legitimacy as a home for many different narratives on the internal conflict without being too politically aligned to any one group. It was this process, it is suggested, that ‘decaffeinated’ the LUM’s content, rather than outright censorship or exclusion of human rights narratives. In a country where contested memories of the conflict are regularly played out during key political moments, Feldman suggests that this legitimacy is key to the LUM’s ongoing survival.

Yet, as some dissenting voices highlighted by Feldman suggest, suggestions that the LUM should be placed in some way above the battles of memory politics are highly political in themselves, and this highlights some of the potential limitations of this methodology. Feldman rightly notes his positionality as a ‘young foreign anthropologist’ (p. ix), and it is important to consider the possibility that the willingness of some of his interviewees to discuss the LUM is at least partly related to an attempt to establish some of their guiding principles and foundational myths for the LUM with a wider audience. As a result, at moments in Memories before the State, it feels a little as if Feldman’s focus on the institutional leaves some of these bigger political questions unexplained or unexplored. The amount of time given to key voices in the LUM’s hierarchy, including Carvallo, Ledgard and Diego García-Sayan, gives us crucial insights into the construction of the LUM’s internal politics, but less space to explore how things could have been different. Key political decisions made in the earlier stages of the LUM’s production, such as a perceived need to move away from Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the primary source on the violence and decisions to treat victim survivors and the human rights community as some voices, among many (rather than the key groups who the museum was designed for as a form of symbolic reparations), are presented by these figures as unshakable truths that must shape the LUM. There are also debates to be had about the involvement of military ‘victims’ of violence in the LUM, and the extent to which this implies a more pluralistic approach to memory construction (as LUM directors and curators would appear to have it) or conversely may involve the obfuscation, elision and deliberate forgetting of the full extent of state violence during the conflict (see Milton, 2018). And although Feldman is keen to contextualise these decisions, it feels at times like the political tensions they generated are left a little unexplored. Ultimately, the LUM’s exhibition and participatory process, and Memories before the State, are similarly framed by what we might call the boundaries of acceptable memory discourse (Willis, 2020) in Peru, which allows for the inclusion of superficially apologetic state voices, but very rarely for perspectives from former Leftist militants (and certainly not, as Feldman highlights, the ‘unrepentant’ ones). But it could be fairly suggested that, in trying to provide an institutional history of the LUM itself, including a wide range of voices excluded by that institution would have been beyond the scope of the project.

Broadly speaking, Feldman’s attempt to provide a specific history of the museum is successful, particularly in drawing attention to different phases and moments which pushed the project in different directions. We are not given a singular, monolithic perspective on what the LUM is now, but learn how the institution, its goals and content shifted shape over the years, between different directors, phases of construction and museographical scripts. Feldman’s conclusion, that the LUM’s continued success in establishing itself as a cultural centre for various sectors of Peruvian society and foreign tourists is a result of its content being basically unsatisfactory but not entirely objectionable to most stakeholders in the consultative process, is well argued and convincing, but more importantly we are led through the process of how the LUM arrived at that point.

With such a tightly focused research project, it is useful that Memories before the State is both highly accessible (including for those less familiar with Peru’s internal armed conflict) and relatively short in length, although of course this does mean that some avenues are left unexplored. It feels somewhat strange that comparisons are not made between the content of the LUM and the Yalpana Wasi – Lugar de la Memoria museum in Huancayo, which opened before the LUM’s inauguration and is perhaps the most similar commemorative project in Peru. And, because the timing of the primary fieldwork and focus on the institutional progress made ahead of the 2015 inauguration, the analysis of post-inauguration changes and controversies is given less time and prominence than might otherwise be expected.

Nonetheless, Memories before the State is an important contribution to literature on memory and the state, as well as to post-conflict memory studies in Peru and Latin America. Its insight on how memory is shaped by institutions, and perhaps more importantly how institutions are shaped by memory, should prove useful to educators and museum practitioners, as well of course to scholars, in the decades to come.

Footnotes

Author biography

Daniel Willis conducts research and writes on the themes of space, violence and memory in Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980–2000). In 2018, he completed a PhD in History and Latin American Studies at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. He has previously published peer-reviewed research in Memory Studies and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. Daniel currently works in policy research and advocacy for the economic justice campaign group Global Justice Now.

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