Khep : Embodied commerce between Dubai and Karachi in the age of surveillance

Abstract

This article explores khep , an embodied cross-border trade network that links Karachi and Dubai through trust, kinship, and risk. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with currency and commodity dealers who move money and goods between the two cities, I argue that khep is not merely a means of evading state regulation but a distinctive system of embodied commerce that has endured from the pre-colonial era to the present day. In this system, merchants mobilize affective and cultural ties to navigate surveillance and assert economic autonomy. By transforming kinship into financial circuitry and using bodies as logistical instruments, khep diverges from the impersonal rationalities of formal markets grounded in regulatory compliance. Khepiyā s—the traders who physically carry goods across borders—develop embodied knowledge and performative skills that transform airport spaces into contested interfaces where informal economies negotiate with state power. These techniques not only provide traders with economic leverage but also shape their subjectivity as nomadic actors characterized by disguise and malleability. I propose understanding khep as a vernacular economic practice, rooted in moral economies, bodily discipline, and situated knowledge, that unsettles dominant paradigms of market exchange. Rather than positioning khep within the binary of licit versus illicit trade, I argue that it represents an alternative economic rationality—one that operates beyond the neoliberal ethos of due diligence and compliance.