Intellectuels et anthropologues des provinces, radicalisme politique ou régionalisme : histoire culturelle et anthropologique à Ayacucho, Pérou 1920-1970

At the end of the 20th century, an armed conflict took place in Peru whose origins and factors that triggered it continue to be discussed even today. This conflict, with the epicenter in the Andean city of Ayacucho, compromised the public university in that region of Peru and the center of education in general since a good part of those who formed part of the subversive group, the Shining Path, were people linked to educational activities. This ultimately led scholars of the subversive phenomenon to trace the intellectual roots of the group that sought to take power through violence.The main approach that scholars take is that the radicalism of the group raised arms in response to a characteristic of the intellectual group of the province or region of the Peruvian highlands discontent with the Peruvian state and reluctant to the changes that impacts of modernization had taken in these spaces at the beginning of the last century. On the contrary, in this thesis we propose that the intellectuals of the provinces like Ayacucho of the first half of the century; far from being radical, they sought to solve the problems derived from a centralist country and with a hegemonic elite located in Lima, the capital of the country, which considered the provinces as spaces lost in time and unable to bend to modernization and modernity.The tensions and conflicts facing the capital shaped cultural relations as well as representations around the central state and the provinces of the interior of the country. The cultural history of Ayacucho cannot be separated from the way these intellectual groups constructed images around the nation, the region and the way of life in the provinces. That cultural history is expressed in the way in which anthropology of the provinces or regions like Ayacucho and Cusco has served to think and undertake the problem of hegemonic visions in Peru. The thesis does not directly tackle a study of the armed conflict, but rather the construction of representations around the intellectual traditions about radicalism and regionalism in the country.