ABSTRACT Ways of studying illegal behaviour are important in the context of Indonesia, a country well known for its failure to deal adequately with the corruption that permeates every level of society. They are perhaps even more salient at the peripheries of the nation-state where government agencies struggle to contain the illegal practices that necessarily emerge where nation-states meet. This article reflects on our experiences conducting a decade-long study of an Indonesian borderlands that, while not initially focused on illegality, came – as a consequence of its ubiquity – to include it as a key construct. This experience led us to grapple not only with methodological questions about how to research illegality but also with assumptions about what illegality is and does. We argue that the only way to recognise and account for the quotidian nature of many kinds of illegal activity in the borderlands is to eschew an ethnography of exception in favour of an ethnography of the mundane.

中文翻译：

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非法如世俗

摘要 在印度尼西亚的背景下，研究非法行为的方法很重要，该国因未能充分处理渗透到社会各个层面的腐败问题而闻名。在民族国家的边缘，它们可能更加突出，在那里政府机构努力遏制在民族国家相遇的地方必然出现的非法行为。本文反映了我们对印度尼西亚边境地区进行长达十年的研究的经验，该地区虽然最初并未关注非法性，但由于其无处不在，因此将其作为一个关键结构。这一经历使我们不仅要解决关于如何研究非法性的方法论问题，还要解决关于什么是非法性和什么是非法性的假设。