El trueno lejano: imágenes que persisten en el río Huallaga (The Distant Thunder—images that persist in the Huallaga river) Encartes, vol. 5, núm 9, marzo-agosto 2022, pp. 59-85.

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(con Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal) “Obtuso es el sentido”: visualidad y práctica etnográfica (Sense Rendered Obtuse: Visuality and Ethnographic Practice) Encartes, vol. 5, núm 9, marzo-agosto 2022, pp. 1-27.

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Oblivious Title: On the Political Time of Land Tenure in Postwar Peru (Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 90, No. 3, 2017, p. 637–674)

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Cocaine's Minor Destinies: Ephemerality and Legal Threat on the Margins of the Peruvian State (American Ethnologist, Vol. 42, No. 4, 2015, pp. 658–672)

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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, 2014, pp. 179-202)

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Abstract: Peru’s Upper Huallaga Valley is a landscape storied with corpses. Though no longer physically present, those lifeless bodies intimate through their absence the growing remoteness of a time when rivers were cemeteries for the anonymized dead and when roads served as the stage for a harsh pedagogy conveying rules of political belonging. Three decades since a cocaine boom first coincided with a Maoist-inspired insurgency, much has changed. In the rhythms and flows of ordinary life that heady, violent history is largely muted. And yet its episodic contours resurface now and again to the extent the valley continues to be an internal legal frontier of the Peruvian nation-state. For the Huallaga is a place where illicit cocaine economies endure through cycles of coca eradication and where counter-insurgent forces still chase down minuscule remnants of a once-powerful guerrilla army. As they reaffirm the legal imperatives of the state, police and army raids actively shift political boundaries of the rural landscape. In so doing they gesture towards that earlier, more lethal era in which mutilated bodies were regularly discarded and worse, put on display, for the ends of marking territory and crafting new law. To the extent that political pre-history once had profound impacts upon relations between people and property, today it is around concerns about theft but also sexual violence that the past insists if in ways that evade direct examination. Hovering obliquely through knowing glances, elliptical references and, on occasion, an inside joke, that past resonates as a virtual co-presence in the humble and prosaic activities of everyday life. It is there in a mundane present, which is simultaneously the continuing wake of that other, meteoric time, that absent corpses linger now as image and on occasion come to the fore.

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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 & Morten Pederson, Routledge, 2013, 80-102)

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Abstract: Since the mid-twentieth century Peruvian law has divided coca into two realms: one, a legal crop regulated for ‘traditional use’; the other, a criminalized enterprise that goes the way of cocaine. While these two realms are regularly held apart in Peruvian public discourse and in scholarship on the Andes, drug traders quietly bring them together when they seek the services of diviners for guidance and protection in their travels. By manipulating materials, often coca leaves, such practitioners are asked to ‘see the road.’ Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between chronos and aion, this chapter examines what drug traders tell of attempts to navigate a risk-infused ‘state-time’ through appeals to a more encompassing divine present.  Coca, then, spans multiple blocks of time, reaching both into the pre-Colombian past and to the future-possessed temporalities of narco-modernities—proscribed, maligned, loaded with threat, yet driven by wondrous promise.

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Furrows & Walls, or the Legal Topography of a Frontier Road in Peru (Mobilities, 7:4, 2012, pp. 501-520)

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