The article is about the games of power that exist between the lines of the legal and the illegal, the formal and the informal. If it is true that the transitivity of people, goods and merchandise on the uncertain borders between the legal and the illegal, the formal and the informal is a transversal phenomenon of the contemporary experience and that it is in the center of the globalization processes, that does not mean the passage from one side to the other one of those porous borders is simple. What we discuss in this article is that those fields of force offer an entry to understand the importance and the role of the State in the social planning, focusing the way the forces of law and order operate in situated contexts, under the view of what some authors have been calling a "state anthropology".
Urban practices; Illegalism; Games of Power; State anthropology
