55 – Woven Braids: Crime, Capitalism, and the State in South Asia
At a time of rising corruption, crime, and criminalization in South Asia, it is especially important to consider what role crime plays for economic growth and state apparatuses. This panel explores the ways in which the realms of crime, politics, and business get deeply entwined in South Asia, and what inequalities emerge from these intertwinements. Scholars of crime have moved away from narrow definitions of criminal organizations as autonomous, internally cohesive, and bounded systems (Levien 2021; Martin and Michelutti 2017; Michelutti et al. 2019), to take seriously how crime works in coalition with rapid economic growth and strengthening state institutions. However, the question of how and through what kinds of relations crime, state, and capital are being intertwined in worldly encounters is still open and deserves further attention. Without an adequate analysis of how informal, criminal networks actually permeate the formal realms of state and capital, we overlook the inner workings and exacerbating inequalities that continue to make these entwined coalitions possible in South Asia. This panel addresses these issues by considering the social embeddedness of crime and corruption. We build on anthropological studies of Italian mafia that have pointed to the relevance of the concept of intreccio (interweaving), literally a “plaited hairdo of tightly woven braids” (Schneider 2018: 16), to grasp the entanglements between crime and the social contexts in which it operates. Our key aim is to probe and adapt this conceptual framework to reflect the role criminal political economies play in South Asia today, with an eye to the emerging inequalities in India and in nearby South Asian contexts. The panel aims to offer a comparative perspective of intreccio in different South Asian contexts, and ultimately ask: what are the implications of intreccio for the forms the political can take?
