Memory and Healing, Essay Example

Kimberly Theidon’s “Justice in Transition: The Micropolitics of Reconciliation in Postwar Peru” and Alinda Honwana’s “Healing for Peace” examine how reconciliation and healing may develop from a past that is largely constituted and informed by war and violence. The authors examine two cases respectively: Peru and Mozambique. In both articles, the emphasis is placed on the need for reconciliation according to an ambition to construct a viable future. This future can be understood on two distinct, yet interrelated levels: firstly, there is an individual or inter-communal future, which can only be realized through a shared cathartic process. Secondly, there is a greater societal healing that is identified by both authors, which is crucial to the future successes of Peru and Mozambique as national projects.

Alinda Honwana’s primary focus is the effects war and violence have had on the rural communities of Mozambique. The author notes that these communities experienced the brunt of the violence during these conflicts. Accordingly, Honwana identifies that the crucial location for any possible cathartic movement in the Mozambique consciousness lies in these very rural communities. Moreover, Honwana believes it is the traditional institutions endemic to the communities that provide the greatest potentiality for such healing. The reliance on such traditional, stable structures form the basic ground for a strategy with which to create a future for Mozambique, according to the very stability and permanence of these structures.

Theidon also gives a critical importance to traditional and communal structures as avenues for reconciliation after war. Theidon confers the term micropolitics to this prospective communal justice. Micropolitics bears the true potential for change, as  the contrasting macro- or standard politics of government remains too far removed from the violence experienced in Peru, violence primarily experienced on individual and familial levels. Thus, the micropolitics of communal and familial organizations remain the crucial tool with which to mediate the trauma of the conflict, insofar as these institutions remain immanent to the conflict itself.

Both Honwana and Theidon thus emphasize the centrality of smaller communal groups, such as families and villages to any process of reconciliation. In essence, both authors forward an endemic approach to reconciliation, positing that true catharsis and healing can only be achieved from within a community. Whereas the logic here appears sound to the extent that these are the groups who were most directly affected by conflict, both authors perhaps minimize the role these groups themselves played in the violence. In other words, both authors intimate that such violence is never the product of inter-tribal rivalry or an ancient hatred, but rather, that such violence is the product of a macro-politics, of an exterior force manipulating the lives of poor and rural communities. This not only overlooks the possible role such groups play in violence, but also essentially strips these groups of their own autonomy, in their portrayal as basic automatons of a greater societal apparatus. The same traditional institutions that, for example, Honwana observes as producing stability, must also be thought in terms of producing stereotypes and prejudices that could be used to perpetuate violence. Such interpretations essentially omit crucial features of the lives of these communities, such as their own unique history.

In essence, both texts present a certain idealistic version of what Theidon terms micropolitics. While correctly identifying the importance of promoting reconciliation on this micro-level, one cannot help but detect a romanticization of this micro-level at work in both articles, in line with a typical anthropological stereotype of the “noble savage.” Accordingly, the accounts seem to omit the pervasive nature of war and violence and how such conflicts may arise in any given situation.