Family, Culture, and "Revolution": Everyday Life in Shining Path

This work attempts to approach an understanding of life and relationships in SL, based on understanding family and culture as instances that come to counterbalance the discourse and rationalize one's own understanding of the party, the war, and violence. Later these same instances reveal tensions and conflicts. We seek to understand daily life and relationships among cadres, combatants, and the "masses" in SL's popular committees; the responsibilities and functions of each of them. The hypothesis we propose is that SL's political discourse, rationally absolutist in its class-based vision, imposed a valuation of militants and the "mass" as a body of combatants in service of the revolution, with no other will than to kill and die for the party.