Richard Kernaghan

 

Richard Kernaghan is an ethnographer of law and aesthetics with a keen interest in rivers, roads and political time. His first monograph, Coca’s Gone (Stanford UP, 2009), describes the aftermath of central Peru’s cocaine boom through stories shared of turbulent pasts. His second book, Crossing the Current (Stanford UP, 2022), charts transformations of territory following the military defeat of a Maoist insurgency in Peru’s Upper Huallaga Valley. Through rural transit, legal topographies, and atmospheric expression, he shows how image, matter and sensation intersect. A new project in the Amazonian triple border region of Colombia, Brazil and Peru will carry forward his concern with legal relations and the reliefs and materialities of landscapes.

 

Kernaghan is a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida, and affiliate faculty in UF's Center for Latin American Studies.

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