David Picherit

David Picherit is an anthropologist based at CNRS – Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative (LESC), University Paris Nanterre. He is interested in political violence, labour, finance and illicit economies in South India where he has carried out extensive fieldworks. His most recent work focuses on the relationship between politics, smuggling economies and environmental predation. His current research explores debt chains and financial mechanisms—ranging from Hawala to fintech—across both legal and illegal markets in India, France, and Brazil.

My field setting

I am conducting an ethnographic study of the predatory logics deployed by a chain of actors involved in the successive eradication of two forest species in southern India: sandalwood in Tamil Nadu between the 1980s and the 2000s, as well as one of its sought-after varieties, red sanders in Andhra Pradesh from the mid-2000s to the present. My fieldwork is carried out alongside woodcutters, smugglers, forest guards, police officers, various bureaucrats, politicians and their henchmen, and lawyers. I also drew on legal archives and carried out a historical ethnography of these illicit economies, based on material traces and oral testimonies.

My key research questions

How do actors in criminal political economies deploy the law as a weapon of extortion in their business activities? How do the extortive relations shape both the everyday economic intimacies and the political economy of the wood smuggling business? How do the cheap and routinized extortive logics enhance expectation of successful careers in illicit economies?

My research findings

My research highlights how the strength of predatory economies and extortive logics lies in the gradual and complicit inclusion of individuals and populations within relationships that are both attractive and violent. It shows that the seductive power of these economies—at once alluring and threatening—rests on the possibility of becoming both prey and predator, creditor and debtor, extortionist and extorted. This research also explores how extortive relations are built upon blurred distinctions between fiction and reality, friendship and betrayal, and extortion and protection. Finally, it examines how the everyday management of legality and illegality by lawyers, politicians, and smugglers is essential in shaping the law as a weapon of extortion.

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