Lucia Michelutti
Lucia Michelutti
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Lucia Michelutti is Professor of Anthropology at University College London (UCL). Her research expertise spans from political and legal anthropology to the ethnographic study of informal economies as well as the anthropology of caste, kingship and ritual. She has carried out extensive fieldwork in North India and has worked in Venezuela and on South Asia and Latin America in comparative contexts. She is the Principal Investigator of the project ‘Anthropologies of Extortion’ (2021-2026) funded by the European Research Council.
My field setting
I have mostly conducted fieldwork in region of Braj in North India. More specifically while following up cases of sextortion I conduced research in a court hub (thana-kacheri) in a provincial town.
My key research questions
Building on my work on popular politics and strongmen in North India and more recently on ‘mafias’ across South Asia (Michelutti 2008; Michelutti et al 2018), I begun my research on unrefusable offers by studying how and why ‘protection money’ is still popularly referred as ‘chauth vasuli’, which refers to the ¼ of the profit/production collected by ‘watchmen’ during the Maratha times. Fieldwork followed up archival work, and explored the emic concept of ‘vasooli karna’ (to collect/recover) across different domains of life – from the terrain of money and organized criminal systems of protection, to the protection of women and domestic violence and related theologies of order and disorder (dharma and adharma) and security (suraksha).
My research findings
Locally unrefusable offers are usually articulated through the emic idioms of ‘taking’ (lena) and ‘re-taking’ or ‘recovering’ (vasooli karna). At times, they are couched in the language of gift and reciprocity (lena dena), and occasionally framed through discourses of protection, whether invoking punitive force (dandaniti) or security (suraksha). Importantly, making unrefusable offers is central to what it is supposed to be the very core of sociality: the family and kinship. Threatening violence is often inherent to family and caste rather than something external to it. ‘Honey trap rackets’ offered an ethnographic entry point into further study of the social life of unrefusable offers (and the law) in family, kinship and gender spheres.
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