Lands, Territory, and Law in Post-war Peru

FAIN: FT-229525-15

Richard Kernaghan
University of Florida (Gainesville, FL 32611-0001)

Summer research and writing on Cultural Anthropology and Latin American Studies.

This project examines how land, territory, and law have transformed during aftermaths of war in a coca-growing region of Peru. Focusing on transportation histories and everyday material practices of transportation operators (transportistas), it documents changes in rural routes, spatial prohibitions, and land ownership. Because of transportistas' close relationships with features of terrains presently in flux, their experiences offer an excellent means for grasping how prior times of violence resonate today as new patterns of rural mobility emerge. The Topographies of Law project critically extends post-conflict literatures, contributes to theories of space and place in the humanities, and enriches the historical record of Peru's internal war. With a NEH Summer Stipend I will undertake two months of fieldwork to order to collect local accounts and visual materials for a manuscript and a digital archive documenting social and topographic legacies of the Huallaga Valley's wartime past.

Associated Products

Crossing the Current: Aftermaths of War along the Huallaga River (Book)
Title: Crossing the Current: Aftermaths of War along the Huallaga River
Author: Richard Kernaghan
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=9781503633407
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry (9781503633407)
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781503633407

El trueno lejano: imágenes que persisten en el río Huallaga (The Distant Thunder—images that persist in the Huallaga River) (Article)
Title: El trueno lejano: imágenes que persisten en el río Huallaga (The Distant Thunder—images that persist in the Huallaga River)
Author: Richard Kernaghan
Abstract: El río Huallaga del Perú fue escenario de una guerra contrainsurgen- te que se cruzó en los años 80 del siglo xx con un boom de la cocaína. Cuando se alejaba la guerra y los moradores de la región narraban sucesos de esa historia, cada vez más remota, el río Huallaga aparecía como potencia: una fuerza que marcaba territorios e intervenía en los trayectos de una violencia múltiple. Este ensayo examina cómo los atributos del río, tanto topológicos como senso-mate- riales, se expresaron desde imágenes que circulaban en épocas de posconflicto. A partir de una lectura del sentido obtuso, este texto vincula las imágenes que sur- gían mediante relatos y sueños con otras, fotográficas, tomadas del río Huallaga cuando la guerra supuestamente ya no amenazaba de manera directa. Poner en conversación distintas manifestaciones de la imagen permite rastrear la incerti- dumbre que se generaba entre diferentes efectos de realidad. También abre la posibilidad de escuchar los ruidos que llegaban lejanamente de la conmoción anterior y que, a veces, lograban perturbar el correr de presentes ya de otros tiempos. Si la etnografía implica responder a mundos empíricos, no con una re- petición simple que copia lo que acontece, sino mediante acercamientos nuevos e inesperados, este ensayo describe y hace resonar imágenes que persistían, o insistían en volver, a partir de un trabajo de campo.
Year: 2002
Primary URL: https://encartesantropologicos.mx/openj/index.php/encartes/article/view/226
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Publisher: Encartes - Revista digital multimedia

Oblivious Title: On the Political Time of Land Tenure in Postwar Peru (Article)
Title: Oblivious Title: On the Political Time of Land Tenure in Postwar Peru
Author: Richard Kernaghan
Abstract: How does political time inflect legal titles to property no less than the possibilities of their falsification? In this article, I consider historical entanglements of rural land tenure in a coca-growing area of central Peru during the twilight years of the Shining Path insurgency. Where regionally the Maoist movement's claim to Revolution had long ceased to be plausible and its own disappearance loomed, I share an episode in which Shining Path surreptitiously manipulated the Peruvian state's administrative power so that parcels seized from a local farmer would be registered as the future legal property of its members and sympathizers. My reflections on this event unfold as a discussion of falsification and its camouflaging effects, through which I ask how shifts in political time at once animate and selectively obscure the multiplicity of social relations that bind people to material things. The bestowal of legal title itself arguably participates in obscuring the plurality of those relations—through an oblivion engendered when legal rights of other, competing, claimants are disregarded. If so, the traces of a former order of insurgent land tenure, persisting into the times of post-conflict, surely complicate such oblivion-effects. Here, the notion of that insurgent order, lingering as it were into the aftermath, serves a heuristic purpose: it draws ethnographic attention to the afterlives of defeated land claims and to the life plans those claims once conveyed.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/35/article/670933
Access Model: subscription only
Format: Journal
Publisher: Anthropological Quarterly

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