Money, Morals and Law

This chapter describes how police officers use specific choreographies, tools and rhetorics, that is, registers that evoke different moral orders: violence, law, social order, sociability, and the market. Even at the much-criticized traffic checks, police officers attempt to render their actions more legitimate by selecting and deselecting specific registers. In this view, stateness is not a substantial essence but a quality of the police that emerges out of this interplay of registers in everyday interactions.