The Informal Everyday: From Marijuana for Breakfast to Itinerant Judges
On November 6, 2012, Colorado was the first US state to legalize marijuana for recreational use. In the span of one night,1 behaviours that were once repressed became permitted, acts that could be considered a legal offence became as legal and regulated as buying any other stimulant, such as chocolate or coffee, in a store. Queues of marijuana-hungry people of all ages formed outside the few shops that had dared to invest in the recreational side of the business and were equipped to provide people the umpteenth legalized drug on the market. Tellingly enough, in the first 30 months, the legalization of marijuana consumption and regulation of its market brought in state revenues amounting to several hundred million dollars2 that would have otherwise been offered to the informal sector.
The example cited above is a clear example of how labile and volatile the boundary between legal and illegal really is. The day before the political decision, marijuana was illegal. The day after, it had become legal and, a few months later, widely available in shops. At different latitudes and in different contexts, we all live in an environment in which rules are pre-defined, almost âparachutedâ onto politically organized communities (most often, modern states) through legal and civil codes the design of which is neither consensual nor participatory. We are innately members of social groups with their own social rules, conventions, behaviours, attitudes and perceptions about what is morally acceptable and socially appropriate and what is not. We are educated and indoctrinated with the rules that are necessary to survive in our given society, fed with laws that we need to know in order to avoid bringing the coercive or punitive arm of the state down on ourselves. We learn the âdosâ and âdonâtsâ of the environment(s) in which we are born, raised and eventually decide to live. Sometimes rules are relatively similar across environments, sometimes they differ radically and at other times they change significantly over time, either gradually or all of a sudden.
Whatever environment we choose or end up living in, whatever the rules we need to comply with, there is a common feature that seems to apply to all such contexts: they are constructed. They are based on interpretations and they require interpretation. They are agreed on at a certain point in the history of the country or its society. They may eventually be enshrined as formal laws or be performed as customs and conventions within a given social class, ethnic group or geographical area. When they are written, and thus codified, they are usually considered âformalâ. When they are not, they are often considered âinformalâ. However, this distinction in itself raises two apparent contradictions. First, formal rules are not fixed, static, reified entities; second, and conversely, informal rules may be relatively steady, stable or resilient to exogenous changes. These rules can go on never being officially acknowledged by formal authorities and still be used to communicate with specific groups.
Formal-informal encounters bring us to a further example attesting to the multilayeredness of the concepts explored in this edition. There is an art-house movie3 narrating the story of a judge whose job is to travel to remote villages that are too distant from a court for their residents to bring an issue before the authorities, and check if there are any unsolved disputes that could escalate into violence or conflict between individuals or groups. He is an itinerant judge who provides his judicial services by horseback, riding around the mountains of Southern China. One day, he finds himself in a Buddhist village where some cattle belonging to a certain family have been killed by members of another family. According to local tradition, financial compensation is not sufficient to settle the case; the offenders must also say prayers to show respect for natural forces. The judge is caught between two realities. As a representative of a secular country where religion has no place, he is supposed to abide by the state-provided guidelines, decide on an amount of financial compensation and leave. However, he knows that such compensation will not be enough and that the conflict will continue to simmer after his departure. Although it is not mentioned in his written account, his final verdict includes a request to pray for the souls of the dead animals, as per local tradition.
Likewise, many decisions have been and are being made by civil servants and officers complying with different forms of rationality, decisions lying in the interstices between what is official and codified, the grey zones of informality. Even in law, usually formalized to the utmost degree, there is a distinction between how the law is conceived and written, on one hand, and how it is actually applied, on the other. That is, there is a gap between how things should be or are supposed to be and how they really turn out to be. Ultimately, this gap between how things should be and how they come to be in reality is at the core of the concept of informality.
The blurred boundaries (Gupta 1995) between formal and informal, public and private, legal and illegal, acceptable and unacceptable have been documented in a wide variety of cases in international scholarship. It remains to be theorized how these shifting mechanisms function, but recent efforts have been directed at classifying a wide range of empirics on informalityâa fundamental starting point to support any theory of informality.4
Informality as a Concept and Source of Scholarly Inspiration
The âinformal sectorâ has long been defined in terms of either unregulated forms of labour aimed at ensuring subsistence and survival in the âunderworldâ, or actual illegal business ranging from unofficial earning strategies and unregistered activities to smuggling, bribing and corruption. Whilst originally defined in relation to economic milieu (Boeke 1942; Lewis 1954; Hart 1973), the field of informality has been enriched by multidisciplinary contributions as well as gradually over-extended by the manifold ways practitioners, policy-makers and scholars have deployed this term. On one hand, a sub-current of economic anthropology and qualitative sociology has studied symbolism and the market (Parry and Bloch 1989; Pardo 1996; Gudeman 2001) to understand the rationale behind informal transactions. On the other, a body of literature has also emerged at the crossroads of legal studies and political science.
In spite of ongoing conceptual advancements and the addition of an ever-growing number of case studies and empirical materials, since it first came into focus the definition of the informal sector has been influenced by the prescriptions of neoliberal orthodoxy, which has interpreted informality as a pathology caused by the stateâs excessive involvement in the economy and the subsequent inhibition of entrepreneurial initiatives. Accordingly, informalityâor, in De Sotoâs phrasing, extralegality (De Soto 1989)âis understood to emerge in situations characterized by high administrative and bureaucratic barriers to formal market entry, and can be curbed through deregulation. Even though these premises have been mitigated and/or challenged, the definition of the informal sector oscillates between its two constitutive dimensions: on one hand, informality as a coping strategy and instrument of survival; on the other hand, informality as an expression of deviance and outlawness, with the latter interpretation also including critical perspectives on the dynamics of criminalization and prohibition. Since its early conceptualization, the boundaries of the field of informality have been redrawn to include any social and political actor and/or process located behind and beyond formal arrangements and institutions, official rules and procedures. In other words, âthe informalâ seems to be defined as a residual category vis-Ă -vis âthe documentedâ, âthe codifiedâ, and âthe certifiedâ. Further, informality has conventionally been seen as something transitional, exceptional or marginal in society (suffice to survey the literature on informality in post-Soviet/post-socialist contexts as well as in developing countries, on one hand, and on urban informality, on the other). This take has come under attack from at least two directions. First, Scott (1977) was one of the major frontrunners in seeing informality as longstanding, enduring and socially embedded: by reflecting on moral economies, he introduced the notion that informal economic practices had a major impact on power relationships (Scott 1985). Second, the opening up of post-socialist spaces after 1989â1991 reignited debates on development, governance and corruption that have continued to this day (Dutt and Kerikmäe 2014; Harboe 2015; Jancsics 2015; Polese and Morris 2015; Polese and Rekhviashvili 2017; Rekhviashvili 2015; Smith and Stenning 2006; Urinboyev and Svensson 2013; Sayfutdinova 2015; Wamsiedel 2016).
Traditionally considered distinct realms, relatively recent scholarship from different backgrounds has come to question the dichotomous and polarized framework that tends to separate the legal and illegal (or âextralegalâ, see De Soto 2000; Varese 2011; Strazzari and Kamphuis 2012). Once more, Scott has pioneered this strand of debate by focusing on the co-constitutive dialectics linking formality and informality (Scott 1998, p. 310) and arguing that formal rules parasitically rely on informal networks and practices. Multiple forms of morality and normativity, plural sources of authority and legitimacy seem to characterize current-day political and social orders in international and transnational politics (Hann and Hart 2009; Dreher and Schneider 2010; Bhattacharyya and Hodler 2010; Henig and Makovicky 2016; Morris and Pol...