Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Kernaghan Proposal
Topographies of Law
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Topographies of law: transportation ethnography in a post-war landscape of Peru
During the 1980s, a Maoist-inspired insurrection spread to Peru’s most prosperous cocaine-producing
region. There, two kinds of outlawed violence—one political, the other economic—overlapped with the
Peruvian state’s no less lethal military and police interventions. From afar, the Upper Huallaga Valley
became a political/legal no man’s land. Up close, space itself fragmented under strict controls that armed
groups imposed on human habitation and movements over land and water (Kernaghan 2009). This project
asks what happens to fractured landscapes of war once a prolonged period of political violence has
passed. To address that question I examine how everyday experiences of land, territory and law have
profoundly changed during the aftermath of the Shining Path insurgency within this coca-growing zone of
Peru. Specifically, I track transformations of rural routes, spatial prohibitions and land ownership by
focusing on the personal histories and material practices of transportation workers (transportistas). These
are men and women who, following decades of war, facilitate mobility between town and country in a
state hinterland where new roads are being built and agricultural property is becoming formalized as
never before. Because of transportistas’ close relationship with micro-features of local terrains presently
in flux, their experiences provide crucial insights into how new patterns of rural mobility emerge amid the
lingering effects of the times of violence. I request a Rothman Summer Faculty Fellowship in order to
conduct six weeks of research in Peru’s Huallaga Valley for an ethnographic monograph that explores
transformations of sociality and territory that are taking hold in the wake of the insurgent-counterinsurgent war. The book will be accompanied by an online archive of digital images visually documenting
rural transit in the aftermath of conflict. (See contact sheet)
I have carried out fieldwork in the region since the mid-1990s, when I began research on historical
memories of a cocaine boom (1974-1995). Publications from that early work, and more recent studies on
mobilities and territoriality, include a book and several shorter peer-reviewed texts (Kernaghan 2009,
2012, 2013, 2014). This project intensifies the spatial emphasis of research conducted since Coca’s Gone.
It also draws on digital photography and video to generate a visual repertoire of rural transport practices
for analysis and public presentation. A Rothman Fellowship will allow me to complete the collection of
ethnographic materials so I can train my energies on finishing my second book. Since I go up for tenure
next year, the fellowship will provide vital assistance at a critical moment of my professional career.
Post-war conditions are often studied through combatants (Macleisch 2013), victims (Das 2007) or
transitional justice (Rojas-Perez 2013). Scholars have analyzed specific ways warfare patterns movement
as it refashions terrains in conflict settings (Feldman 1991, Weizman 2007). Less attention has been given
to places where political violence blurs with narco-economies (e.g. Colombia, Afghanistan, Mexico,
Central Asia). Particularly neglected are the spatial impacts (counter)insurgencies, cocaine and police
interdictions have on rural communities over time. By spotlighting those who make rural transit possible,
my research extends the critical reach of post-conflict literatures as it enriches the historical record of
Peru’s recent internal war (1980-2000). Although the Huallaga was a major military front of the conflict
(Peru 2004), no thorough history has been written. Voices of Huallaga residents have received meager
national attention, and despite foundational work by a Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(Peru 2004), scholarship on the Huallaga remains limited relative to other major zones of the war.1
As an ethnographer, and one-time researcher for the Peruvian Truth Commission, my Huallaga
fieldwork has impressed upon me the immensity of what happened during the conflict. To comprehend
that history, however, one must not separate the past from the post-war present. Emerging changes have
to be assessed in dialogue with the people who have experienced them, through careful descriptions of
places they inhabit and routes they travel. Terrestrial and fluvial transportation offer a vital point of entry.
They set the present in stark relief against the times of war (when small planes, for instance, ferried
cocaine and cash between Peru and Colombia until the imposition of a no fly zone). Rural transportation
1
But see van Dun (2009). Attention to other regions of Peru has been comparatively vast, including notable recent works on
post-war conditions and historical memory, i.e. Gonzalez 2011; Theidon 2012; and del Pino and Yezer 2013.
Kernaghan Proposal
Topographies of Law
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also provides a prism for examining relations of law and space by foregrounding social lives and events
that transpire between town and country. In canoes, barges, cars, and mini-vans, transportistas navigated
spatial prohibitions at great risk and, in so doing, bridged the spaces fragmented by the unfolding conflict.
Since then they have played a prominent role in transforming the post-war rural landscape.
This research contributes to a growing anthropological literature on how experiences of law acquire
spatial expression in state hinterlands (Poole 2004, Harvey 2005, Benda-Beckman et. al 2009). Informed
by theories of spatial taboo (Munn 1996) as well as scholarship on affect (Stewart 2007, Berlant 2008), I
focus on the relational nexus that arises between patterns of movement, palpable prohibitions and
physical terrains (Gordillo 2011). My primary theoretical intervention entails a critique of the figurative
trajectory of much spatial analysis, which undervalues the sensuous, material features of landscapes as
well as the transitory, historical forces that animate them. As such, I locate my work within the rich
humanities literature on place-making that highlights political materialities of space (Mrázek 2002,
Taussig 2004) and demonstrates how people and physical terrains become mutually constitutive across
time (Raffles 2002, Massey 2005). Topographies of Law privileges rural transportation, because it is a
basic way people and landscape come into transformative contact. Within anthropological approaches to
law and violence, scholars have examined spatial formations of power through the social life of walls,
prisons, military bases and gated communities. Rural transportation has received less scrutiny. Even
within the anthropological literature on roads (Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012) and ethnographic studies of
checkpoints (Tawil-Souri 2011), transportation ethnography has not been used as a lens for assessing
long-term effects of political and drug-related violence on rural space.
I will use the Rothman Fellowship to fund meals, lodging and local travel during six weeks of
fieldwork along the Huallaga River near the towns of Aucayacu and Progreso. Prior phases of my
transportation research (IRB protocol #2011-U-0590) were conducted over the summers of 2011, 2012
and 2013. With interviews, field notes and images accumulated from those trips I have outlined book
chapters. This final stint of fieldwork will enable me to cross-check historical accounts and vastly expand
my repertoire of transit photographs and videos. These visual materials are a crucial aspect of the project
even beyond their documentary and analytical value. For in parallel with writing the book I am building a
user-oriented multi-media platform to reach a broad spectrum of potential audiences. With this online
forum I will disseminate processual dimensions of my research, while allowing viewers to comment.
Hosted by UF Libraries, the interactive platform will be open-access and bilingual (English-Spanish).
Upon returning from Peru next August I will begin finishing chapter drafts. The Topographies of
Law manuscript will have an introduction, five chapters and an afterword. Several sections have already
been given as invited talks or have appeared in edited volumes. Chapter 1, Semblance in Terrain,
examines the historicity of prohibitions through close ethnographic descriptions of post-war river
crossings where ferry and moto-taxi operators congregate. Asphalt Trenches (Chapter 2) tracks the
temporal effects of the Shining Path’s 1980s sabotage of the main trunk highway. Chapter 3, Time as
Weather, explores how the insurgency’s demise facilitated everyday passage from town to country while
exacerbating rural anxieties about theft and other ‘common’ crimes. Chapter 4, Between Twilights,
analyzes controls on movement imposed by armed groups through the narration of encounters between
transportistas and soldiers, police or insurgents. The last chapter, Oblivious Title, weighs postwar land
claims through accounts of two former canoe operators who recovered farms in a final insurgent enclave.
Stanford University Press has expressed interest in this project. A Rothman Fellowship will enable
me to submit a prospectus to them for an advanced contract in September with anticipated publication in
2017. A Spanish-language translation will make the research findings available to my Huallaga
interlocutors and other readers in Peru and Latin America. The Huallaga Valley has been a target of USsponsored cocaine interdiction since the late-1970s, so this project will be of interest to diverse audiences,
not only humanities scholars who study law, space and post-war conditions but readers concerned with
the social impacts of the ‘War on Drugs.’ In a region of Peru where there are currently no archives for the
(post)conflict traces I am collecting, I also hope the future manuscript and web platform can encourage
local, grassroots interest in community-based oral history projects on the war’s legacies.
Kernaghan Proposal
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Benda-Beckmann, Franz von, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, and Anne M. O. Griffiths. 2009.
Spatializing Law: An Anthropological Geography of Law. Farnham Surrey, England: Ashgate.
Berlant, Lauren. 2008. “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event.” American Literary History 20 (4):
845–60.
Dalakoglou, Dimitris and Harvey, Penny. 2012. “Roads and Anthropology: Ethnographic Perspectives on
Space, Time and (Im)Mobility,” Mobilities 7 (4): 459-465.
Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
del Pino, Ponciano, and Caroline Yezer, eds. 2013. Las formas del recuerdo: etnografías de la violencia
política en el Perú. Lima: IFEA, IEP.
Feldman, Allen. 1991. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in
Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
González, Olga. 2011. Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes. University of Chicago Press.
Gordillo, Gastón. 2011. “Ships Stranded in the Forest.” Current Anthropology 52 (2): 141–67.
Harvey, Penelope. 2005. “The Materiality of State Effects: An Ethnography of a Road in the Peruvian
Andes.” In State Formation: Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Christian Krohn-Hansen and
Knut G. Nustad, 123-141. London: Pluto Press.
Kernaghan, Richard. 2009. Coca’s Gone: of Might and Right in the Huallaga Post-Boom. Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press.
________________. 2012. “Furrows and Walls, or the Legal Topography of a Frontier Road in Peru.”
Mobilities 7 (4): 501–20.
________________. 2013. “Readings of Time: of Coca, Presentiment and Illicit Passage in Peru.” In
Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest and the Future, edited by Martin Holbraad and
Morten Axel Pederson, 80–102. Routledge Studies in Anthropology. London: Routledge.
________________. 2014. “Time as Weather. Corpse-work in the Prehistory of Political Boundaries.” In
Governing the Dead: Sovereignty and the Politics of Dead Bodies, edited by Finn Stepputat, 179-202.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Macleisch, Kenneth. 2013. Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage Publications.
Mrázek, Rudolf. 2002. “Asphalt as Language.” In Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and
Nationalism in a Colony, 1–42. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Munn, Nancy. 1996. “Excluded Spaces: The Figure in the Australian Aboriginal Landscape.” Critical
Inquiry 22 (3): 46–465.
Peru. Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación. 2004. Informe Final. Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor
de San Marcos.
Poole, Deborah. 2004. “Between Threat and Guarantee: Justice and Community in the Margins of the
Peruvian State.” In Anthropology in the Margins of the State, edited by Veena Das and Deborah Poole,
35–65. Santa Fe: School of American Research.
Raffles, Hugh. 2002. In Amazonia: a Natural History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rojas-Perez, Isaías. 2013. “Inhabiting Unfinished Pasts: Law, Transitional Justice and Mourning in
Postwar Peru.” Humanity 4(1): 149-170.
Taussig, Michael. 2004. My Cocaine Museum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tawil-Souri, Helga. 2011. “Qalandia Checkpoint as Space & Nonplace.” Space and Culture 14 (1): 4-26.
Theidon, Kimberly. 2012. Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Van Dun, Mirella. 2009. Cocaleros: Violence, Drugs and Social Mobilization in the Post-Conflict Upper
Huallaga Valley, Peru. Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers.
Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London; New York: Verso.
Kernaghan Proposal
Topographies of Law
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Rothman Summer Faculty Fellowship –Amount Requested: $3000.00
Budget
international airfare
1150.00
GNV-LIM-GNV (estimate from kayak.com)
meals (Lima)
328.00
state dept. per diem rate ($82/day x 4)
meals (Huallaga region)
2240.00
state dept. per diem rate ($56/day x 40)
lodging
650.00
local transportation
600.00
total
4968.00
taxis; domestic flight in Peru (200.00); gasoline
Funding secured
1200.00
The UF Center of Latin American Studies. These monies have been awarded
for international conference travel: I will be giving an invited talk as well as
leading a workshop for students at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del
Perú when I pass through Lima en route to my field sites in the Huallaga
Valley.
amount still needed
3768.00
Funding pending
3000.00 (requested)
Rothman Fellowship
500.00 (estimate)
CLAS faculty travel award
250.00 (estimate)
Department of Anthropology faculty travel support
6000.00
NEH Summer Stipend
Kernaghan Proposal
Topographies of Law
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curriculum vitae
RICHARD KERNAGHAN
Department of Anthropology
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611
(352) 294-7585 | [email protected]
CURRENT AND PAST POSITIONS
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Florida (August 2010 - present)
Affiliate Faculty, Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida, (Fall 2010 - present)
Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Fordham University (September 2007 - May 2010)
Consultancy: Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (June 2002 - February 2003)
EDUCATION
Ph.D.
Columbia University, New York, May 2006
Dissertation Coca’s Gone: an Ethnography of Time and the Political in Peru’s Upper Huallaga Valley
M.Phil.
M.A.
B.A.
Languages
Columbia University, New York, May 1998
Columbia University, New York, Fall 1995
The University of Texas at Austin, Anthropology, December 1989
Graduated with Highest Honors, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi
La Pontificia Universidad Católica, Lima, Peru (September 1988 - July 1989)
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX (September 1983 - December 1984)
English, Spanish
AWARDS AND HONORS
Humanities Scholarship Enhancement Fund, University of Florida, $10,210 (June 2013-May 2014)
“Time as Weather: Corpse-work in the Prehistory of Political Boundaries” (September 2014)
“Minor Destinies of Coca: ephemerality and legal threat in a state margin of Peru” (under review)
Postdoctoral Fellowship, Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University (September 2006 - May 2007)
Coca’s Gone (Stanford University Press 2009)
Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Field Research Grant (June 1999 - March 2000)
“Fidelidad o el viento que sopla en una pierna bien alzada” (2000)
Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Grant (June 1998 - March 1999)
Columbia University Doctoral Fellowship (1994 - 1998, 2000)
Columbia University Presidential Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching (1997)
PUBLICATIONS
books
2009 Kernaghan, R. Coca’s Gone: of Might and Right in the Huallaga Post-Boom. Stanford University
Press.
Reviews of Coca’s Gone
• Journal of Latin American Studies 42: 619-21 (2010) by T. Grisaffi
• Contemporary Sociology 40 (1): 58-59 (2011) by S. Schatz
• Journal of Latin Am. & Caribbean Anthropology, 16(2): 468-470 (2011) by B. Dean
• Bulletin of Latin American Research 30 (3): 369-370 (2011) by S.L. Taylor.
articles
2012 Kernaghan, R. “Furrows and Walls, or the Legal Topography of a Frontier Road in Peru.”
Mobilities 7(4): 501-520.
Kernaghan Proposal
Topographies of Law
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2000 Kernaghan, R. “Fidelidad o el viento que sopla en una pierna bien alzada.” Debates en sociología
25 [Lima, Peru] (2000): 49-62.
book chapters
2013 Kernaghan, R. “Readings of Time: of Coca, Presentiment and Illicit Passage in Peru.” In Times of
Security, edited by Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen. Routledge.
2014 Kernaghan, R. “Time as Weather: Corpse-work in the Prehistory of Political Boundaries.” In
Governing the Dead: Sovereignty and the Politics of Dead Bodies, edited by Finn Stepputat.
Manchester University Press.
under review
• article: “Minor Destinies of Coca: ephemerality and legal threat in a state margin of Peru”
•
in preparation
• article: “Oblivious Title: on the Political Time of Land Tenure in Postwar Peru”
• article: “Semblance in Terrain: River Crossings of a Peruvian Postwar Landscape”
• book manuscript: Topographies of Law: transit landscapes in an aftermath of war
INVITED TALKS
• “Rasgos de terreno: los cruces de río como paisajes de posguerra en el Perú.” Colegio de Michoacán,
Zamora, Mexico (February 24, 2015)
• “Oblivious Title: on the Political Time of Land Tenure in Postwar Peru.” Colegio de México, Mexico,
D.F. (February 23, 2015)
• “Minor Destinies of Coca. Between State-time and presentiment in Central Peru.” Lindenwood
University, Center for International and Global Studies (March 13, 2013)
• “Destinos menores de coca.” Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Peru (June 21, 2013)
SELECTED PRESENTATIONS
• “Semblance in Terrain: River Crossings of a Peruvian Post-War Landscape.” Panel (co-organizer):
Building Territory: on the ethnographic rendering of Landscape and Infrastructure.” Annual Meeting of
the AAA (December 5, 2014)
• “Retratos de terreno: los cruces de ríos como paisajes de posguerra en el Perú.” Panel: “Visualizando
Futuros: imagen fotográfica y utopía” 3o Congreso Mexicano de Antropología Social y Etnología,
(Mexico City, September 25, 2014)
• “Oblivious land, or the ties that hide in camouflage title.” Panel (co-organizer): “Cosas bamba del Perú:
camouflage as aspirational force” LASA International Congress (Chicago, May 23, 2014)
• “Dissembling Terrains.” Panel (co-organizer): “The Vital Disguise: Counterfeiting in Latin America.”
Annual Meeting of the AAA (November 21, 2013)
• “Liquid Territories of Coca.” LAS conference Rethinking Law and Legality: Critical Approaches to
Law and Lawlessness in Latin America. Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, April 27, 2012)
• “Readings of Time.” Times of Security Workshop, University of Copenhagen. (May 18, 2011)
• “Asphalt Trenches: First Roads, a Maoist Path and Other Questions of Historical Sedimentation.”
Agrarian Studies Colloquium Series, Yale University. (New Haven, April 20, 2007)
• “Time of Rot: Recalling a road, remains and the force of Sendero law.” Ethnography and Social Theory
Colloquium. Department of Anthropology, Yale University. (New Haven, April 9, 2007)
RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS
Ethnographic writing; law, violence, and illicit social worlds; territoriality, state margins and settler
frontiers; political and legal time; rural roads, rivers and circulation; political economy; state ritual,
secrecy and subjectivity; empiricism, sense and sensation; history, memory, narrative; image theory and
aesthetics; drugs and (counter)insurgency; Maoism and the Shining Path; Peru; Latin America.
Kernaghan Proposal
Topographies of Law
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ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK
• Emergent forms of rural mobility, Huánuco-San Martín, Peru (June-July 2011, June 2012, July 2013)
• Historical memory and political boundaries in Upper Huallaga Valley, Peru (June - July 2010)
• Coca farming and post-boom cocaine trade in Huánuco, Peru (July 2006)
• Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission: histories of political violence and cocaine trade, LimaHuánuco-San Martín (June - August 2002)
• Dissertation field research on the cocaine boom and boom memories in the Alto Huallaga. LimaHuánuco-San Martín, Peru (June - July 1997; May 1998 - August 2000)
TEACHING
Graduate Seminars:
• War and Forgetting (Fall 2010, Fall 2012, Fall 2014)
• Roads and Road Publics (Spring 2011, Spring 2014)
• Ethnography and Illicit Flows (Fall 2011, Fall 2013)
• Topographies of Law (Spring 2013)
• Ethnographic Writing (Spring 2015)
Undergraduate Classes:
• Anthropology of Law (Fall 2010, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014)
• Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Spring 2011, Spring 2013)
• Topographies of Law (Fall 2011, Spring 2014)
SERVICE
Department of Anthropology
• Undergraduate Education Committee (Fall 2010 - present)
• Undergraduate Honors Coordinator (Fall 2011 - present)
• Graduate Financial Aid Committee (2013-14)
• Department Summer Field Research Grants Search Committee (2011-2013)
University of Florida
• Faculty Advisory Council, Center for Latin American Studies (2013-2015)
• Selection Committee, Summer Field Research Grant, Center for Latin American Studies (Spring 2014)
• Selection Committee, Humanities Scholarship Enhancement Fund, Liberal Arts & Sciences (Fall 2013)
• Faculty Search Committee, Crime Law & Governance Program, Latin American Studies (Spring 2012)
Profession
• grant reviewer for SSRC-IDRF (2014-2015)
• blind reviewer for Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (2014)
• blind reviewer for Journal of Latin American Studies (2014)
• blind reviewer for Law and History Review (2014)
• blind reviewer for Cultural Anthropology (2012)
PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS
American Anthropological Association
Society for Cultural Anthropology
American Ethnological Society
Latin American Studies Association