ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the hauntings of intimacy and violence in contemporary death, food, and other ghost stories. The chapter also explains reckoning with ghosts is important for a critical understanding of both Peruvian food festivals and histories of political violence that made spectacles out of the killing of both humans and non-humans. The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission was tasked with making sense of the years of internal war and authoritarianism. The placards hanging on the necks of dogs seemed to connect this shadowy organization more directly with China than with Peru, though one could certainly find commonalities in the histories of uneven development in both countries. While Peruvians were disturbed by the sight of hanging dogs, most dismissed Sendero as a fringe group, insane, creepy, and perhaps irrelevant. Mistura, a culinary festival that celebrates the new cosmopolitan, multicultural, and economically dynamic Peru. Mistura serves as such an incantation, a way to dispel Sendero's ghosts.
