Richard Kernaghan
Associate Professor, Anthropology
Affiliate Faculty, Center for Latin American Studies
I am an ethnographer of aesthetics and legal relations, intrigued by how vitalities of political time find expression in rivers, roads, and other distinctive features of landscapes that move. My research to date has examined aftermaths of war and everyday experiences of law in a settler frontier where (counter)insurgency and illicit economies have entwined. My first book Coca’s Gone (Stanford, 2009) is an ethnography of a post-cocaine boom in a region of Central Peru known as the Upper Huallaga Valley. In that work I reflect on local narratives of a turbulent past and how they bear the traces of law-making processes at the margins of the state. While describing violence events, and the kinds of sense they make available, I explore the potential of ethnographic writing to convey the visceral ambience of threat-laden worlds.
My second book, Crossing the Current (Stanford UP, 2022) documents transformations of territory through the oral histories and practices of rural transit operators. In wakes of war, and following the defeat of the Maoist Shining Path, riverine landscapes of the Upper Huallaga have been materially refigured. They have also been affectively altered, as legal topographies that once signaled who could travel and where one might linger have markedly changed. Drawing on lived encounters, photographs, sketches, videos, and other images from fieldwork, Crossing the Current asks how transitions to a postwar era can be grasped aesthetically: through the subtle but deliberate ways people craft everyday itineraries between town and country.
I am presently embarked on a new project, ethnographic and archival, which examines histories, descriptions, and techniques of river travel in Western Amazonia—lowland water ecologies never completely disconnected from the heights of the Andes. Through the lens of transit practices – their obvious changes and sometimes secret continuities, I am studying the moving reliefs and aqueous materialities of riverine landscapes. With this research I explore and hope to better understand how terrains, by way of their variation, inflect legal relations in what is now a triple-border region of Colombia, Brazil, and Peru, but which was, not so long-ago, disputed territory of Spanish and Portuguese empires.
Areas of Interest/Research
- Legal relations, territory, terrain
- Rivers, roads & transportation
- Ethnographic writing & image
- Philosophies of sense
- Settler colonialism & frontier law
- Political matter, memory & oblivion
- Dreams, presentiment, divination
- Aesthetics, technics & technical things
- Coca ecologies
- Amazonia, Peru, Latin America
Contact Information
Email: kernaghan@ufl.edu
Office: 335 Grinter Hall
Mailing address:
Department of Anthropology
1112 Turlington Hall
University of Florida
P.O. Box 117305
Gainesville, FL 32611-7305