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2           precipitating surfaces

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Chapter 2 opens looking out, across the river towards the town of Nuevo Progreso, from floodplains once home to insurgency and the coca/cocaine trade. With Reynaldo – a man who has worked these heady waters for fifty years – and other veteran transportistas, I explore the ordinary, seemingly precarious, coordinations of bodies, road vehicles, canoes, barges, and an array of water-transit accessories, which come together to enable Huallaga River crossings. Aftermaths of war have fundamentally altered the social connectivities authorizing human circulations throughout this valley’s rural expanses. Yet hovering behind or alongside everyday movements between town and country, the extremity of what transpired pulses the terrain. Photographs from fieldwork help me reflect on specific ways river crossings happen in this postwar era: through corporeal techniques and material tetherings that ferry operators draw on as they contend with the intervals that continually crop up between boat, water, and bank.

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