Curandero (Medicine man), qanras (dirty men) and condenados (dead men) in the time of the war: the representation of the disappearance of people in Ayacucho

Abstract

This paper explores the representation of the ¿ disappearance of Francisco Buendía, a man from the village
of Muya, in the rural area of the province of La Mar, Ayacucho, who was kidnapped by Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path) in 1984. The analysis resorts to Andean categories to demonstrate that, for his relatives, Buendía’s disappearance represents a confirmation of chaos in the communal social space, since it is the result of the presence of anomalous individuals concentrating negative attributes of evil beings present in the Andean cosmovision.