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Schooling a Body Politic: Professional Education and the Palimpsest of Conflict in Peru
Silverstein, Sydney Meredith
Silverstein, Sydney Meredith
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Abstract
Images reveal layers of meaning in holes left by silence and institutionalized memories. In this thesis, I combine forms of oral and visual ethnography to understand more subtle legacies of Peru's internal armed conflict in the city of Tarapoto, in Peru's Upper Amazonian region. From roughly 1980 to 2000, a violent conflict raged throughout Peru, pitting the State against rebel groups, most notably the Shining Path. I analyze these decades of conflict in terms of their impact on institutions of tertiary education, where a substantial amount of rebel organizing took place. As Peru experiences a relative decline in its national university system, I connect this to an oppressive State response to the presence of rebel groups in campuses of the national university, and subsequent neoliberal educational reforms that slashed funding for public universities, most notably programs in the social sciences and humanities. In contrast to the situation of public universities, I highlight the emergence of numerous private, and often for-profit, universities and technical institutes in Tarapoto, as elsewhere in Peru. The proliferation of private tertiary schools must be considered in light of the role that the national universities played as sites of Shining Path organizing. In tertiary education, I argue, conflict leaves its mark through restrictions on spaces of higher education associated with dissenting rebel movements, concurrent with a promulgation of private and corporatized higher education emphasizing professional and technical courses of study. This speaks to a strategy of reconciling conflict favoring a modernizing, neoliberal development agenda seen by the State as a means of addressing the staggering structural inequalities that congealed into a series of violent conflicts and rebel movements. Analyzing both visual and oral data, I examine how these threads of conflict and State actions are woven into the contemporary educational experience among tertiary students in Tarapoto. I conclude with a discussion of how history is institutionalized in educational spaces, producing and reproducing particular understandings of the past and visualizations of the future.
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Date
2012-08-31
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University of Kansas
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Cultural anthropology, Conflict, Education, Neoliberalism, Peru, Visual anthropology