Illegal Anthropology: An Introduction

Abstract

In “States and Illegal Practices,” Josiah McC. Heyman and Alan Smart (1999) illustrate thesymbiotic 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 highlightingdistinctions between the social (licit) and political (legal) construction of legitimacy. CarolynNordstrom (2007) further reminds scholars that such distinctions are never static, as the legaland 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 exclusivelyarticulated by, states) “illegalizes” particular people and practices, excluding them from themoral–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 (seeGomberg-Munoz 2011).˜Many scholars and activists now eschew the term “illegal” for its negative associations. How-ever,wemake“illegality”aprincipaltopicofinvestigationinordertodenaturalizeandcritiquelegality, reveal the term’s sociopolitical construction, and lay bare the profound implicationsthat “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 investigatednot in opposition to, but alongside studies of the state, power, ethics, and the law. In thissymposium, 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 categoryproduces when, as Nicholas De Genova (2004) puts it, “there is [often] nothing matter-of-factabout...illegality” (161).Each contribution interrogates the processes through which legal categories and attendantpower relations are solidified rather than taking for granted the authoritative status of the stateand 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 andSilbey 1998). In this symposium we examine how subjects come to understand practices asright or wrong regardless of, and perhaps in spite of, formal legal classifications, and drawattention to how people engage with, and position themselves in relation to, the law. Weattend to how they imagine law should work, and how people craft notions of justice thatmayparallel,contradict,evade,orreinforceofficialdividesbetweenlegalandillegalpractices.We illustrate how legal orders institutionalize assumptions justifying societal divisions and