Dancing at the corner of the dead: remembering and forgetting in post-conflict Ayacucho, Peru

This thesis considers dance as an embodied form of collective memory in the Andean department of Ayacucho Peru, following 20 years of brutal internal conflict. It combines the areas of cultural memory studies with history and anthropology to discover new ways of accessing and understanding non-verbal forms of collective memory through dance. It uses embodied research techniques to reveal that dance is a deep embodiment of the broader concerns of the people of Ayacucho. It argues that dance plays a significant role in the collective memory-making practices of Ayacuchanos as they search for a history that makes sense of what happened.