Under The Table: An Anthropology of Corruption Podcast

For this—our final episode-- Sylvia interviews Aaron about his recent book, The Elementary Forms of Corruption: Moral Imagination and Political Change in Brazil (Hau Books, 2025). We talk about corruption in Brazil and especially about the shifting "folk models" of corruption (as Aaron calls them) that rural Brazilians use to apprehend moral transgressions. Sylvia calls on Aaron to unpack his wordy and confusing definition of corruption, "the degradation of a sacred gradient through the transgressive rerouting of a social currency," which Aaron does to really nobody's satisfaction. Then, Aaron talks about the four different "moments" of corruption that he traces from the 1950s through PT-led progressive era, all the way through the Bolsonaro era. Finally, a teary goodbye to each other and to you all.

Sylvia and Aaron chat with Cris Shore (Professor of Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths) about his work on corruption in the European Union. We talk about the EU's "parallel system of administration,"  methodologies for studying that which should not be seen, the trouble defining corruption, the weaponization of anti-corruption laws, university/academic corruption, the rise of "audit culture,"  and "shit swimming" (a surfers' campaign against corruption in sewage management), and legalized corruption in Britain. 


Some of Cris Shore's Publications
2024. Compliance, Defiance, and ‘Dirty’ Luxury: New Perspectives on Anti-Corruption in Elite Contexts. Edited by Tereza Østbø Kuldova, Jardar Østbø, and Cris Shore. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

2024. (with Susan Wrights). Audit Culture: How Indicators and Rankings are Reshaping the World. London: Pluto Press. 

2021. "Audit Failure and Corporate Corruption: Why Mediterranean Patron-Client Relations are Relevant to Understanding the Word of International Accountability Firms." Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 90: 91-105.

2005. (with Deiter Haller) Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto Press. 

Sylvia and Aaron chat with Anu Sharma about her work on corruption and good governance in India, including that country's "Right to Know" movement and related Transparency of Information legislation. We discuss the relationship between anti-corruption legislation and women’s development and empowerment in India. We discuss the category of “techno-moral assemblage”  key to Anu's oeuvre and the related limitation of liberal models of corruption. We talk about the Left-Right valence of Indian anti-corruption discourse and how anti-corruption efforts in India shift their institutional frame from NGO to social movement to political party-- often to overcome government resistance to real anti-corruption transformation.

Below are some of Anu Sharma's corruption-related publications:

 Logics of Empowerment: Development, Gender and Governance in Neoliberal India. 2008. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

“Epic Fasts and Shallow Spectacles: The ‘India Against Corruption’ Movement, its Critics and the Re-Making of ‘Gandhi’” 2014. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 37(3): 365-380.

(with Erica Bornstein) “The righteous and the rightful: The Technomoral politics of NGOs, social movements, and the state in India.” 2016. American Ethnologist 43(1): 76-90. 

“New Brooms and Old: Sweeping Up Corruption in India, One Law at a Time.” 2018.  Current Anthropology. Vol. 59, Supplement 18. S72-S82.  

Sylvia and Aaron interview Alan Smart about his research on Chinese practices of gift-mediated friendship (guanxi) and the role of guanxi relations in capitalist ventures.  Guanxi  is increasingly viewed as a form of corruption but it remains important to the success of new commerce. This leads us to discuss the role of informality in general and specifically in Hong Kong's contested squatter settlements, which is the subject of Alan's most recent book.  Alan leaves us with some useful guanxi-inspired advice for academic success, which might be particularly interesting for our junior academic listeners.     

(Very) Selected References
Books
(co-authored with Fung Chi Keung Charles) 2023. Public Housing and Formalizing Squatting in Hong Kong, 1963–1985. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

1992. Making Room: Squatter Clearance in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: University of
Hong Kong, Centre of Asian Studies.

Articles
1993.  “Gifts, Bribes and Guanxi: A reconsideration of Bourdieu’s Social Capital.”
Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 3: 388–408.

(with Josephine Smart) 2017. “Formalization as Confinement in Colonial Hong
Kong.” International Sociology 32, no. 4: 437–453.

2018. “The Unbearable Discretion of Street-Level Bureaucrats: Corruption and
Collusion in Hong Kong.” Current Anthropology 59, no. S18: S37–S47.

Sylvia and Aaron chat with Dr. Smoki Musaraj about her book, Tales from Albarado: Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in Postsocialist Albania (Cornell University Press, 2020). 

We discuss the forms of corruption (and corruption allegations) that arose during Albania's rapid transition from an insular command economy to a neoliberal capitalist economy. Smoki takes us through her work on ponzi schemes, satyrical anti-corruption television,  kin-focused remittences from Albanians working abroad, and the use of corruption allegations for partisan ends. 

Below are some of Smoki Musaraj's recent works: 

Smoki Musaraj and Nataša Gregoriç Bon. 2021. “Introduction: Remitting, Restoring and Building Contemporary Albania.” In Remitting, Building, and Restoring the Contemporary Albania. Palgrave Macmillan.

Smoki Musaraj. 2021. "Temporalities of Concrete in a Postcommunist City." In Remitting, Building, and Restoring the Contemporary Albania. Palgrave Macmillan.

Musaraj, Smoki. 2019. “The Magic of Pyramid Firms: Political Cosmologies, Credibility and Collapsed Finance” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology. 84(2): 179-200.

Maurer, Bill, Smoki Musaraj, and Ivan Small. Editors. 2018. Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Inclusion and Design (opens in a new window). New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. (The Human Economy Series, Eds. Keith Hart and John Sharp).

Musaraj, Smoki. 2018 “Corruption, Right On! Hidden Cameras, Satire and Intimacies of Anti-corruption.” Current Anthropology. 59 (S18): S105-S116.

Musaraj, Smoki and Ivan Small. 2018. "Introduction: Money and Finance at the Margins.: In Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Inclusion and Design. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. pp. 1-18.

Musaraj, Smoki. 2018. “Corruption Indicators in the Local Legal/Political Landscape: Reflections from Albania. In The Palgrave Handbook of Indicators in Global Governance by Indicators. Eds. Deborah Valentina Malito, Gaby Umbach, and Nehal Bhuta. Palgrave Macmillan.

Some of Italo Pardo's published works include:

2023. Pardo, I. Ed. (with G. B. Prato), The Legitimacy of Healthcare and Public Health: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Forthcoming

2019. (with G. B. Prato). Legitimacy: Ethnographic and Theoretical Insights. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

2004. I. Pardo ed. Between Morality and the Law: Corruption, Anthropology and Comparative Societies Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Reprinted by Routledge 2016

Some of Italo Pardo's ongoing activities include:

The book The Legitimacy of Healthcare and Public Health: Anthropological Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan) is now out. The link is:  The Legitimacy of Healthcare and Public Health: Anthropological Perspectives | SpringerLin

April 2023. A public lecture on “Politicized Urban Heritage” at the Tbilisi State University, Georgia: https://www.tsu.ge/ka/event/3995 and https://www.facebook.com/internationalurbansymposium.ius

2023 Field Training School and Research Seminar on Urban Research: Theory and Methods: https://www.internationalurbansymposium.com/events/2023-field-training-school

2023 International Conference on Forms of Inequality and the Legitimacy of Governance:https://www.internationalurbansymposium.com/events/2023-2/

Sylvia and Aaron interview Professor Michael Herzfeld about his latest book, Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022 .

We begin with Dr. Herzfeld's penchant for comparing seemingly disparate cultural settings, settings that, as he argues, share parallel histories of "crypto-colonialism."  To take his latest example, we discuss how mountain dwellers in Greece and urbanites in Bangkok make similar subversive claims against their states by positioning themselves as the authentic protagonists of their nations' celebrated traditions. We fit this discussion into Dr. Herzfeld's larger body of work, especially his arguments about the embarrassing forms of "cultural intimacy" (the fellowship of the flawed) that lie at the core of national solidarity. 

That brings us to corruption, which Dr. Herzfeld understands as a sort of "political incest" (2018), and to the dirty secret that patronage plays in facilitating national solidarities (and then taking the blame when things go wrong).  Our discussion leads us to corruption in the US and Wester Europe, the need for performative competence when ordering off the menu in Dutch restaurants, and to a brief debate about the validity of "corruption" as an analytic category. 
 
We conclude with a question of fieldwork ethics. Dr. Herzfeld shares his critique of the way Internal Review Boards in the US prevent ethnographers from pressing for answers to hard questions. 

Sylvia and Aaron talk to Kregg about  soy bean cultivation in Paraguay and the role of corruption and anti-corruption measures in rural land struggles.  We  discuss the encroachment of mechanized soy production into subsistence farming, the link between soy cultivation, democracy and anti-corruption, and the effects of anti-corruption measures on campesinos (peasants) who pursue land claims in Paraguay's courts.  Kregg also reflects on the ethics of patron-client relationships (a species of the corruption genus) and the depiction of these "clientelist" relationships in  ethnographic writing.

Here are some of Kregg's books:
2020 The Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of monocrops. Durham: Duke University Press.

2019 Infrastructure, Environment and Life in the Anthropocene. Edited volume with Duke University Press.

2011 Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in neoliberal Paraguay. Durham: Duke University Press.

Sylvia and I discuss her book, Ethics or the Right Thing?: Corruption and Care in the Age of Good Governance University of Chicago Press,  2022 (Distributed for HAU).

Sylvia tells us how state officials in one Indonesian province found themselves caught between Western models of governmental impartiality ("the right thing") and familial models of reciprocity and mutual care ("ethics").  Sometimes these officials are able to satisfy both norms at once, but sometimes not. 

We discuss Indonesian anti-corruption projects that target practices of nepotism,  the circumstances in which officials enjoy the discretion to favor those in their extended family when dispensing jobs or other scarce resources, and  Indonesian distinctions between self-serving from altruistic acts of nepotism.

We explore some reasons why the merger of family  and business relations could be useful: building morale, affording deeper interpersonal knowledge of co-workers/subordinates, etc. and some questions of equity and fairness that arise in such contexts.

Sylvia reviews the link between economic and ideological trends in Indonesian history during the 20th Century, and we discuss the language policies of the "New Order"  that used the words  "mother" and "father" (in Indonesian) to refer to work superiors.  

Finally, Sylvia argues that recent anti-corruption, pro-transparency policies  have had the paradoxical effect of generating new forms of corruption, both hidden and all-too visible.  

In the second episode of the podcast series, we interview Dr. Daniel Jordan Smith, Professor of Anthropology at Brown University as well as the Charles C. Tillinghast, Jr. Professor of
International Studies. Dan is the author of a landmark ethnography of corruption, A Culture
of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (2007). We discuss this book as well as his latest Every Household Its Own Government: Improvised Infrastructure, Entrepreneurial Citizens, and the State in Nigeria (2022). Dan explains how Nigerians understand corruption, its place in their national culture, and Nigerians' efforts to fight it.  As Dan makes it clear, the “culture of corruption” in Nigeria is as much a "culture against corruption."

Daniel Jordan Smith (2007) A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular
Discontent in Nigeria. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.
Daniel Jordan Smith (2018) “Corruption and ‘Culture’ in Anthropology and Nigeria."
Current Anthropology 59(S18): S83–S91
Daniel Jordan Smith (2022) Every Household Its Own Government: Improvised
Infrastructure, Entrepreneurial Citizens, and the State in Nigeria. Princeton University
Press: Princeton, NJ.