November 2013 Page 211

Kedron Thomas
Washington University in St. Louis
Rebecca B. Galemba
The University of Denver

Illegal Anthropology: An Introduction

In “States and Illegal Practices,” Josiah McC. Heyman and Alan Smart (1999) illustrate the
symbiotic relationship between the state and illegal practices, arguing that their interrelation-
ship offers “important terrain for studying the complexity of power and ‘common sense’” (7).
Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham (2005) contribute to this discussion by highlighting
distinctions between the social (licit) and political (legal) construction of legitimacy. Carolyn
Nordstrom (2007) further reminds scholars that such distinctions are never static, as the legal
and illegal overlap and merge in everyday practice. This symposium builds on such schol-
arship by examining how dominant legal discourse (often guaranteed by, but not exclusively
articulated by, states) “illegalizes” particular people and practices, excluding them from the
moral–legal community and rendering them available for criminalization, marginalization,
exploitation, and even dehumanization. We therefore define “illegalization” as a sociopolit-
ical process that serves to uphold particular relations of power and delegitimize others (see
Gomberg-Muñoz 2011).
Many scholars and activists now eschew the term “illegal” for its negative associations. How-
ever, we make “illegality” a principal topic of investigation in order to denaturalize and critique
legality, reveal the term’s sociopolitical construction, and lay bare the profound implications
that “illegalization” has on individual lives (Bacon 2008). As a powerful index of social, po-
litical, and economic inequality, we insist that “illegality” and “illegalization” be investigated
not in opposition to, but alongside studies of the state, power, ethics, and the law. In this
symposium, therefore, we examine the effects of the distinctions between legality and ille-
gality and what illegality as a social, subjective (Willen 2007), political, and spatial category
produces when, as Nicholas De Genova (2004) puts it, “there is [often] nothing matter-of-fact
about . . . illegality” (161).
Each contribution interrogates the processes through which legal categories and attendant
power relations are solidified rather than taking for granted the authoritative status of the state
and the rule of law. Legality is not a stable set of rules and norms, but rather, as Peggy Levitt
(2001) notes, the “meanings, sources of authority, and cultural practices that we think of as
[legitimate], no matter who uses them or what their goals may be” (112; see also Ewick and
Silbey 1998). In this symposium we examine how subjects come to understand practices as
right or wrong regardless of, and perhaps in spite of, formal legal classifications, and draw
attention to how people engage with, and position themselves in relation to, the law. We
attend to how they imagine law should work, and how people craft notions of justice that
may parallel, contradict, evade, or reinforce official divides between legal and illegal practices.
We illustrate how legal orders institutionalize assumptions justifying societal divisions and

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 36, Number 2, pps. 211–214. ISSN
1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934.  C 2013 by the American Anthropological Association.
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/plar.12022.
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inequalities based on social difference even as they provide resources for people to contest
their exclusion.
This symposium makes at least three interventions in the political and legal anthropology
scholarship. First, it details the complex ways that illegal practices may reinforce or contest state
power, while also highlighting how studies of these practices can generate new understandings
of legitimacy. Second, it interrogates the objectivity and stability of the categories “legal”
and “illegal.” The contributors treat actors and activities not as inherently belonging to one
of these categories, but as “legalized” or “illegalized” within specific contexts of power and
politics. Third, it goes beyond the state to examine the impact of other regulatory authorities on
enactments of law and order, morality, and legitimacy. Contributors to this symposium illustrate
how local repertoires of value and legitimacy, as well as transnational legal frameworks,
discourses, economic arrangements, and security policies, structure regimes of legality and
morality. Such repertoires and frameworks may exert pressure on states to conform to them
or may complement or challenge state legal arrangements. We argue that careful analysis of
plural regulatory contexts can reveal power dynamics at play as various actors seek to define
the political, economic, and moral landscape.
The three featured research articles bring ethnographic specificity to bear on processes of le-
galization and illegalization. Michael Polson, in “Land and Law in Marijuana Country: Clean
Capital, Dirty Money, and the Drug War’s Rentier Nexus,” shows how boundaries of legality
and illegality blur in Northern California, where marijuana cultivation and the substance’s
prohibition are vital to economic development and the accumulation of rent capital. Polson
exposes regulatory frameworks beyond state law that include social mores evident among
growers and regional investors and shifting political interests at multiple scales of analysis.
In “On and Off the Record: The Production of Social Legitimacy in an Argentine Border
Town,” Ieva Jusionyte takes us to the borders that divide Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina to
analyze how local media produce, circulate, and obscure particular legalities and illegalities.
Her contribution illustrates how configurations of power emerge from social fields in which
licit and illicit practices intertwine in everyday practice, even as differently positioned groups
and individuals seek to blur, defend, or alter the institutional divide between legal and ille-
gal behavior. A third article, “Smugglers, Fayuqueros, Piratas: Transitory Commodities and
Illegality in the Trade of Pirated CDs in Mexico,” by José Carlos G. Aguiar, explores the
historical and ongoing construction of local legitimacies alongside transnational constructions
of criminality in the context of Mexico’s informal economy and the hemispheric “wars” on
drugs, smuggling, and digital piracy. Each of the authors finds these diverse locations pro-
ductive for interrogating the processes through which particular populations and activities are
rendered illegal and dangerous or ethical and legitimate. And with attention to the local and
everyday, the authors emphasize how ordinary people insert themselves and, in practice, define
and transform the trajectory of these politicized processes.
Carmen Ferradas, in “The Nature of Illegality under Neoliberalism and Post-Neoliberalism:
A Commentary,” next offers her reflections on this set of research articles. She complements
her assessment with observations pulled from her own long-term research in the Triple Fron-
tera region of South America. Ferradas draws special attention to transnational dimensions of
illegalization and, together with the subsequent article by Rebecca Galemba, titled, “Illegality
and Invisibility at Margins and Borders,” interrogates the commonplace association of ille-
gality with border zones and social and geopolitical margins.1 Understood as both geographic
and conceptual spaces, where sovereignty is often unsettled and debated yet also vigorously
defended, margins and borders are especially productive sites for examining the “frontier(s) in
the struggle to assert sovereignty or disrupt it, to expand or contract the limits of the il/licit”
November 2013 Page 213

(Comaroff and Comaroff 2006:11; see also Das and Poole 2004). We would add that the
social marginalization of people, places, and practices and the construction of geographical
and conceptual borders is often part of what makes “illegality” come to seem like an objective,
even commonsensical, attribute. Ferradas and Galemba also draw attention to how margins
and borders are discursively and practically reconfigured as they gain renewed importance in
transnational economic and security debates and policies.
Building on these ethnographic and theoretical contributions, we advocate anthropological
research that questions anthropology’s role in the study of and practical engagement with
regimes of illegalization. The next two symposium pieces, by G. Derrick Hodge (“The Prob-
lem with Ethics”) and John Osburg (“Meeting the ‘Godfather’: Fieldwork and Ethnographic
Seduction in a Chinese Nightclub”), focus on research praxis and epistemology, demonstrating
how the study of illegal practices raises critical questions regarding methods and ethics. How
do anthropologists situate themselves ethically and practically when their studies are often at
odds with those in power, the law, dominant notions of “common sense,” and even granting
institutions and institutional ethics boards? How do we develop new conceptual and ethical
tools to study what we may not be authorized or even supposed to study? The symposium
concludes with an afterword by Josiah McC. Heyman (“The Study of Illegality and Legality:
Which Way Forward?”), who offers concrete recommendations for how to advance the anthro-
pological study of illegality in both social scientific terms and as a form of ethical and public
engagement with contemporary conditions of inequality and insecurity.
By integrating theory, methodology, ethnography, and ethics, this symposium encourages
a holistic consideration of anthropology’s relationship to illegal practices. The contributing
authors are all too aware of how challenges to official notions of legitimacy may be inadvertently
embedded in processes that reinscribe legal hegemony. Such challenges may also, however,
open up new spaces for thinking about legitimacy “otherwise” (Escobar 2004; Mignolo 2011).

Notes

Acknowledging, of course, that populations and practices that concentrate very close to ge-
ographic and symbolic centers of state (and other forms of) power are also available for
criminalization, we pay special attention here to how processes of illegalization are so often
accompanied by projects of marginalization.

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