The Global Informality Project headed by Alena Ledeneva, Professor of Politics and Society at UCL, explores society’s open secrets, unwritten rules and know-how practices. Broadly defined as ‘ways of getting things done’, these invisible yet powerful informal practices tend to escape articulation in official discourse. They include emotion-driven exchanges of gifts or favours and tributes for services, interest-driven know-how (from informal welfare to informal employment and entrepreneurship), identity-driven practices of solidarity, and power-driven forms of co-optation and control.
The paradox, or not, of the invisibility of these informal practices is their ubiquity. Expertly practised by insiders but often hidden from outsiders, informal practices are, as this resource shows, deeply rooted all over the world, yet underestimated in policy. Entries from the five continents presented in this online encyclopaedia are samples of the truly global and ever-growing collection, made possible by a remarkable collaboration of over 200 scholars across disciplines and area studies.
The contribution from Dr Daniela Peluso, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, is on the vernacular slang-use of the term “aumento” (‘a bit extra’, a ‘top-up’), which can refer to something as benign as food or as corrupt as illegal logging that is claimed to be sustainably logged. While she describes the context in which the informality of logging occurs amongst indigenous communities, she goes further to describe how bureaucratic systems that push people into informality can serve to dehumanise indigenous peoples, and how such peoples can experience informality as a way of restoring their moral personhood.