They are key evidence to support Ruby’s central argu-ments about community, reflexive methodologies, andthe feasibility of ethnographic studies of the contempo-rary United States (and by extension of other culturallyplural urbanized societies).

There is a danger of spuriously assuming greaterauthenticity as a consequence of visual ethnographies,but perhaps reality television has now demonstrated thepower of editing to construct deceptive representations.In the hands of a more manipulative anthropologist,Ruby’s video could convey a very different picture.Therein lies one of the tensions within visual anthropol-ogy. The power of seeing someone say or do somethingon video (or film) may potentially be more viscerallypersuasive than reading a textual account of the samething. However, Ruby has adopted a strategy that seemsto me both right and necessary to address intentionalor unintentional misrepresentations. First, he has donewhat film schools say is badFhe has put a camera on hisinterviewees and left it there. The video modules aremostly a series of talking heads, sometimes in poor lightand with less than ideal acoustic environments (thoughalways understandable). Ruby’s questions and commentsremain in the video so that the final product resemblessomething genuine, if at times rambling. Second, he hasprovided text to accompany the video. One text sectionrelates to the project as a whole and is reproduced onevery CD. Additionally, each module or CD offers spe-cific text about the group on which that particular CDfocuses, along with relevant social, historical, and eco-nomic background. Finally, Ruby occasionally embedstext in the video clips themselves.

Throughout the collection Ruby takes users on anethnographic journey, which can be challenging to theuser. Those who have embraced nonlinearity as a meth-od for disseminating anthropological ideas andinformation should find this work easily accessible andpossibly even too restrictive. Those who have only re-cently dragged their noses out of the dead trees on theshelves will find this reassuringly predictable and sup-portive thanks to the provision of extended essaysexploring theoretical and methodological issues whichneed no appreciation of the power of hyperlinks. Rubydoes not compel his users to ‘‘read’’ the work in a givenorder, any more than the author of a book can compel areader not to browse the index and the conclusion beforereading the substantive middle bits. Instead, Ruby offersclear signposting throughout which permits user-de-fined but replicable navigation. It is more ambitious thanmost ethnographic CDs, which makes it ultimately bothmore useful and harder work.

Each of the modules provides a very clear set ofreadings and video materials, which can easily be inte-

grated into teaching the relevant issues raised by eachmodule (race, sexuality, globalization, and commodifi-cation are the obvious ones). Because there areaccompanying video materials it is tempting to say thatthe work is ideal for first-year introductory classes, butthis seems to be doing the work a gross disservice. Videodoes not render this work ‘‘easy.’’ In some ways, it is theopposite. Ruby provides abundant textual accompani-ment, but to really assess Ruby’s arguments, it isnecessary to pay close attention to what informants sayas they say it. This is not a neatly transcribed version thatone can scan quickly and get the gist of just before alecture or a seminar. In a 30-minute interview, the usermust listen to its entirety to find out whether Ruby hasdrawn appropriate inferences and textually representedthe person and his or her views in useful ways.

Finally, one important contribution to pedagogymust be methodology. Not only does Ruby provide anextended discussion of reflexive methodology, but thevideo modules also let users hear Ruby in conversationswith his informants. It might be a very good idea to makea few of these video modules compulsory viewing for allanthropology students before conducting field inter-views so they can hear that we do not typically imposeclinical data production models on our interactions withinformants. In fact, as Ruby’s videos illustrate, such in-terviews in their entirety end up sounding like chats withfriends. These are often characterized by a good deal ofdisclosure from researcher to researched, which under-standably and justifiably, in my view, does not make itinto many final ethnographic accounts, but neverthelessshould not be a point of embarrassment or shame foranthropologists. Ruby is therefore to be commended forproviding an exemplar for how multimedia, nonlinearethnographic studies may be produced in rigorousscholarly ways, which still capitalize on informationtechnologies to more meaningfully integrate anthropol-ogy with visual communication.

State of Fear: The Truth about Terrorism

Directed by Pamela Yates, 2005, 93 minutes, color. Dis-tributed by Skylight Pictures Inc., 330 W. 42nd Street,24th floor, New York, NY 10036, http://www.skylightpictures.com

Marıa Elena GarcıaUniversity of Washington

Pamela Yates, Peter Kinoy, and Paco de Onıs’ State ofFear: The Truth about Terrorism is among the best doc-umentaries regarding the political violence that scarredPeru in the 1980s and 1990s. Based on the testimony of

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the 17,000 Peruvians who participated in the publichearings of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Com-mission (TRC), the film offers a broad historical, cultural,and political survey of the conditions that enabled thetwin tragedies of Peru: the rise of the Maoist SenderoLuminoso (Shining Path) and the brutal military reactionof the Peruvian state, particularly the authoritarianregime of Alberto Fujimori.

The filmmakers usefully remind viewers that Peru isnot only Lima, as we are taken to the Andes and theAmazon to meet victims of and participants in this war.State of Fear is at its best in allowing viewers to hearfrom a broad range of voices. We hear and see a faithfulfollower of Abimael Guzman, the Shining Path leader,who helps us understand why Guzman was nicknamed‘‘Shampoo’’Fbecause he ‘‘washed your brain.’’ We alsohear testimonies of a former marine, indigenous childsoldiers, highland farmers, human rights activists, truthcommissioners, and others. While all stories are harrow-ing, one that stands out is that of a young student who iskidnapped before even beginning classes at the univer-sity, tortured, and gang-raped, which results in herbecoming pregnant and giving birth in jail before beingsentenced (by hooded judges) to 20 years in prison. Wemeet her and her daughter, and can only begin to imag-ine the potential impact of this terror on not only theimmediate victims, but also on the younger generationswho grew up in the midst of this war. These generationsare both survivors and, as in this case, the very productsof Peru’s decades of violence.

Like all documentaries, however, State of Fear pro-vides a particular set of interpretations from a particularset of vantage points. Despite the film’s multivocality, thisis a view of Peru seen from the perspective of Lima. This istelling and perhaps even fitting given the overwhelmingimportance that is given to the capital city in nationalpolitical life generally and to the work of the PeruvianTRC specifically. I do not mean to imply that the TRClimited its work to Lima, as it was the first Latin Americantruth commission to hold televised, public audiencesthroughout the departments and provinces of the country.Nevertheless, despite the TRC’s finding that 75 percent ofthe victims of the violence were indigenous Peruvians,not a single member of the commission is indigenous.

While not minimizing the TRC’s Herculean effortsand its final report (which can be accessed at http://www.cverdad.org.pe/), there is a danger in representingthis, or any other, single interpretation as the authorita-tive ‘‘truth’’ about Peru’s violent history. Viewers of thisfilm will not be aware of alternative readings of theTRC’s work and of differing opinions about the impor-tance of ‘‘memory.’’ Who is being asked to rememberand who would rather forget? One never learns of the

often clumsy choreographies of provincial audiencias inwhich urban, Spanish-speaking commissioners directedthe testimonies of Quechua or Ashaninka survivors. Thefilm also does not provide viewers a sense of local(mis)understandings of the TRC, of desperately poorfamily members who in many cases thought that the TRCwould offer some material assistance to those whooffered testimonies.

Necessarily perhaps, the film offers a limited andpartial view of societal responses to violence. A strikingomission is the lack of any mention of rondas campesinas,peasant self-defense organizations, who scholars agreewere central obstacles to Senderista campaigns. This maybe due to the very ambiguity around ronderos who fallsomewhat uneasily between victims and agents of war-fare. The elision of this kind of ambiguity is a missedopportunity for the film to explore the gray zone of vio-lence that is not simply between democrats and terrorists.

There is also something misleading about the period-ization of this film, which, to be fair, follows closely thatof the official Peruvian TRC. By emphasizing the war inthe past tense, and focusing on a peaceful future, the verygoal of the TRCFwhich in theory is to contribute towardrebuilding society after terrorFignores increasing vio-lence against indigenous populations on the part of thestate, guerrillas, and paramilitaries. This blindness is es-pecially significant as the global ‘‘war on terror’’continues to allow for the blatantly opportunistic refram-ing of opposition to the state as ‘‘terrorism.’’ While thecriminalization of protest in Peru has become particularlypronounced in the policies of the current Alan Garcıa ad-ministration, the structural violence faced by millions ofPeruvians is hardly new and has been largely untouchedby the work of the TRC or any other Peruvian state actor.

Another problem with the film’s close following of thePeruvian TRC is that unlike many other cases, the statecomes to the government-sponsored truth commission os-tensibly having defeated the opposition, even if the regimethat did so (the Fujimori regime) was discredited for otherreasons. Amnesty laws (passed in 1995 by Fujimori) applyto state and paramilitary forces, but not to anyone deemeda ‘‘terrorist,’’ even if he or she may have been falsely ac-cused (as has been the case for hundreds of Peruvians).Moreover, military and paramilitary organizations areincluded in the TRC report’s narrative of terror, but alsoFand primarilyFpraised for their contributions to thefight against terror. It is telling that while the makeup ofthe commission included no indigenous representation,one of the five members added after Alejandro Toledo tookoffice was an ex-Air Force general (and President Ale-jandro Toledo’s national security adviser to boot).

Understandably, the film lionizes human rightsworkers and the doubtlessly valiant intentions of many

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of the members of the TRC. Nevertheless, it is importantfor students to wrestle with the ethical and politicalcomplexities that haunt even the best of intentions. Hu-man rights workers, in an effort to avoid being labeled asterrorist sympathizers, often remained silent in contro-versial cases, a silence that ran the risk of adding to thepresumed guilt of the many people who were rounded upby police and military forces.

The film also casts a spotlight on the telegenic,conservative politician Beatriz Alva Hart, who chroni-cles her own transformative journey, from beingskeptical about human rights critiques of the govern-ment to apologetic for her own blindness to the violencethat was engulfing so much of the country. Althoughone perhaps should not be overly cynical about herchanging views, the film never explores the possibilitythat symbolic apologies and the guilt of the upper classescan mean very little to those who suffered the worstconsequences of the violence, a sentiment I have heardexpressed often.

These critiques notwithstanding, State of Fear raisesprecisely the kinds of questions that I expect my studentsto ask. I have used this documentary in anthropologyand interdisciplinary classes about the politics ofviolence in Latin America, and I have found it a terrificpedagogical resource. It is an important complement toreadings about both politics and political violence inPeru. In watching the horrific images of the impact ofviolence on women, children, and men, seeing a cap-tured Guzman on-screen, hearing and seeing Fujimorideclare an autogolpe (self-coup), and watching excerptsfrom the Vladivideos, crucial moments come to life forstudents in ways not possible when they only read arti-cles or books on the subject. In my experience, thedocumentary works best when paired with the work ofscholars who develop underemphasized dimensions ofthe story (Orin Starn, Nightwatch: The Politics of Protestin the Andes, Duke University Press, 1999; ‘‘Justice inTransition: The Micropolitics of Reconciliation in Post-war Peru,’’ Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2006:433–457; Carolyn Yezer, Anxious Citizenship: Insecurity,Apocalypse and War Memories in Peru’s Andes, Ph.D.dissertation, Duke University, 2007; Ponciano del Pino,‘‘Family, Culture, and ‘Revolution’: Everyday Life withSendero Luminoso,’’ in Shining and Other Paths: Warand Society in Peru, 1980–1995, Steve Stern, ed., DukeUniversity Press, 1998:158–192).

The documentary also allows students to hear di-rectly from leading scholars of the violence, mostnotably anthropologist Carlos Ivan Degregori, who alsoserved as a TRC commissioner. Through the analysis ofDegregori and others like journalist Gustavo Gorriti andhuman rights advocate Sofia Macher, students gain

valuable insights for discussions about history, race,politics, and violence in Peru. In engaging the varyinginterpretations of this excellent film, students also areinvited to undertake their own critical readings of rep-resentations of truth and power, politics of memory, andcolonial legacies.

Finally, it is telling of the filmmakers’ intentionsthat the title of this valuable film, State of Fear: TheTruth about Terrorism, contains no mention of Peru inparticular, but rather seems to suggest that we situatePeru within a larger context of ‘‘wars on terror’’ that be-gan long before September 11, 2001. Throughout theAmericas and the world, countless societies have soughtto move from bloody internal violence toward democ-racy, truth, and justice. The difficulty of these transitionsin Peru and elsewhere remains as cautionary tales anduseful lessons for U.S. audiences that may be less famil-iar with the long history of terror in the world.

Silences

Directed by Octavio Warnock-Graham, 2006, 22minutes. Distributed by New Day Films, PO Box 1084,Harriman, NY 10926, http://www.newday.com

William RickardsAlverno College

In Silences, the New York–based filmmaker OctavioWarnock-Graham returns to his family’s home in Mau-mee, Ohio, to confront questions of childhood andidentity. As a multiracial child in what wasFand con-tinues to beFan essentially white suburb of Toledo, hegrew up in a loving family, embraced by his stepfather,yet clearly the child of an earlier relationship between hismother and a man from a differentFpresumably AfricanAmericanFracial background. His mother’s silenceabout this early relationship and how her family mem-bers have maintained this silence is the heart of thisnarrative. In Silences, Warnock-Graham raises questionsabout his African American heritage and his own per-sonal identity. Through a series of taped interviews, heunpacks the myths and constructed stories of his familyand their close friends. (Who did people agree to believewas his father? What agreements were negotiated betweenhis mother, her family, and the incoming stepfather?)With fuller knowledge and a growing understanding ofwhat his mother faced as she built her own life, Warnock-Graham makes his way to San Francisco with only aname and a number to meet his father, and connect withhis extended family. He subsequently returns to Ohio tocontinue discussions with his mother, and to reflect onhis new obligations to reconcile these strands in his life.

88 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 25 Number 1 Spring 2009