The Anthropology of Corruption

Previous articleNext article FreeThe Anthropology of Corruption Wenner-Gren Symposium Supplement 18Danilyn RutherfordDanilyn Rutherford Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreCorruption is in the eye of the beholder. And yet it makes for an excellent focus of anthropological comparison, as the articles in this special issue of Current Anthropology make clear. Articles that take a deep dive into changing notions of legitimacy and how they shape what counts as corruption (Feldman 2018; Pardo 2018; Schneider 2018). Articles about what corruption means, and what it means to combat it in places exposed to the rhythms of global capitalism and transformations in the politics and perceived enemies of the nation-state (Bocarejo 2018; Hetherington 2018; Nugent 2018). Articles about anti-corruption campaigns that end up spawning new kinds of abuses (Feldman 2018; Osburg 2018; Shore 2018; Smart 2018). Articles that show how the term is used to conjure an innocent past, or a procrustean present, in a world where the old distinction between the primitive and the modern takes the form of talk about good and bad governance and successful and failed states (Ansell 2018; Bocarejo 2018). Articles that show how critiques of corruption can conjure utopian futures, where the promise of popular sovereignty makes itself felt (Hornberger 2018; Musaraj 2018; Sharma 2018; Smith 2018; Tidey 2018).The papers for this special issue were initially written for a Wenner-Gren Foundation Symposium held September 9–15, 2016, at Tivoli Palácio de Seteais in Sintra, Portugal (fig. 1). The participants traveled to Portugal from a range of institutional homes, in Canada, Colombia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They shared findings from fieldwork conducted in a range of settings, from mule trails in the coastal mountains of Colombia to banquet halls in urban China. Diana Bocarejo came from the Universidad del Rosario to discuss her work in the coastal mountains of Colombia, where mule drivers swept up in drug trafficking followed by a tourist boom engage in ethical everyday deliberations that offer a trenchant critique of legality, corruption, and the state. Aaron Ansell of Virginia Tech offered a fascinating depiction of political clientelism in Northeast Brazil and how local people draw a distinction between illegitimate vote buying and morally upright transactions with the politicians they seek to elect. David Nugent from Emory University drew a comparison between the contemporary concern with corruption and the anxieties that motivated anti-Communist purges in mid-twentieth-century Peru. Ilana Feldman came from George Mason University with a paper showing how Palestinian refugees and humanitarian workers have come together in relations of care and suspicion, and how their concerns about corruption prove critical in determining what humanitarianism is and should be.Figure 1. Participants in the symposium “The Anthropology of Corruption.” Front row, from left: Smoki Musaraj, Sarah Muir, Anu Sharma, Diana Bocarejo, Laurie Obbink, Fátima Pinto. Middle row: Soo-Young Kim, Jane Schneider, Akhil Gupta, Leslie Aiello, Ilana Feldman, Aaron Ansell, Julia Hornberger, Italo Pardo. Back row: Cris Shore, Sylvia Tidey, Dan Smith, Alan Smart, Kregg Hetherington, David Nugent, John Osburg.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointAlan Smart from the University of Calgary told a story from Hong Kong’s history involving boat squatters, street-level bureaucrats, and a series of colonial-era reforms that left room for collusion between corporate leaders and officials in the highest echelons of the state. John Osburg of the University of Rochester showed how recent crackdowns in post-Mao China have reconfigured the relationship between corruption and class formation among various segments of the elite. Jane Schneider from the City University of New York and Italo Pardo from the University of Kent drew from their first-hand experiences to describe how Italian efforts to stamp out organized crime have shaped national and local politics and everyday life. Sylvia Tidey from the University of Amsterdam, Anu Sharma from Wesleyan University, Smoki Musaraj from Ohio University, and Kregg Hetherington from Concordia University told rich stories of the surprising effects of anti-corruption campaigns in Indonesia, India, Albania, and Paraguay. Julia Hornberger of the University of the Witwatersrand, Cris Shore of the University of Auckland, and Daniel Jordan Smith of Brown University brought the conversation closer to home: to Hornberger’s students and their memories of paying bribes to get their driver’s licenses; to Shore’s university, which hired a global accounting firm to combat corruption, even though very few cases had come to light; to Smith’s Nigerian informants and their reactions to his study of corruption—which included a lawsuit threatened by someone named in the book.The organizers, Sarah Muir and Akhil Gupta (2018), knew the symposium would traffic in questions of ethics, politics, and inequality. What they didn’t expect was how talk of corruption shapes spatial imaginings: some regions are by definition corrupt, and whether or not a practice is taken as legitimate has to do with where it is done, with certain offices, street corners, and nation-states associated with the subtle, yet highly conventionalized dealings through which corruption is said to work. This is the magic of a Wenner-Gren symposium: it brings together new interlocutors to yield new insights. It is also the magic of ethnography, when it comes to this topic: it is uniquely suited to follow the threads that connect people and their projects and to make sense of how they justify what they do.Other Wenner-Gren symposia have taken up some of the issues raised in this gathering, from changes in the mapping of the public and the private to the ways regimes of value can coexist and clash. Most recently, these include Politics of the Urban Poor (Das and Randeria 2015), The Life and Death of the Secret (Manderson, Davis, and Colwell 2015), Crisis, Value, and Hope: Rethinking the Economy (Narotsky and Besnier 2014), and Corporate Lives: New Perspectives on the Social Life of the Corporate Form (Partridge, Welker, and Hardin 2011). This symposium’s earliest predecessors include Kinship and Culture (Hsu 2017 [1971]), Local-Level Politics (Swartz 1968), and Law in Culture and Society (Nader 1969).Wenner-Gren symposia provide a unique opportunity for invited scholars to meet for intensive discussion of important issues in anthropology. Symposia are partnerships between the Foundation and the academic organizers, and we are always looking for new and important ideas from all branches of anthropology for future symposia and eventual publication in Current Anthropology. We are eager to hear from anyone who has in mind a topic that could spur the kind of field-furthering conversations that made this symposium so productive. Information about the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the symposium program, and what makes for a good symposium topic can be found on our website at http://wennergren.org/programs/international-symposia).References CitedAnsell, Aaron. 2018. Clientelism, elections, and the dialectic of numerical people in Northeast Brazil. Current Anthropology 59(suppl. 18):S128–S137.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarBocarejo, Diana. 2018. Thinking with (il)legality: the ethics of living with bonanzas. Current Anthropology 59(suppl. 18):S48–S59.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarDas, Veena, and Shalini Randeria, eds. 2015. Politics of the urban poor: aesthetics, ethics, volatility, precarity. Special issue, Current Anthropology 56(suppl. 11).First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFeldman, Ilana. 2018. Care and suspicion: corruption as definition in humanitarian relations. Current Anthropology 59(suppl. 18):S160–S170.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarHetherington, Kregg. 2018. Peasants, experts, clients, and soybeans: the fixing of Paraguay’s civil service. Current Anthropology 59(suppl. 18):S171–S181.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarHornberger, Julia. 2018. A ritual of corruption: how young middle-class South Africans get their driver’s licenses. Current Anthropology 59(suppl. 18):S138–S148.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarHsu, Francis L. K., ed. 2017 (1971). Kinship and culture. New York: Routledge.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarManderson, Lenore, Mark Davis, and Chip Colwell, eds. 2015. The life and death of the secret. Special issue, Current Anthropology 56(suppl. 12).First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMuir, Sarah, and Akhil Gupta. 2018. Rethinking the anthropology of corruption: an introduction to supplement 18. Current Anthropology 59(suppl. 18):S4–S15.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarMusaraj, Smoki. 2018. Corruption, right on! hidden cameras, cynical satire, and banal intimacies of anti-corruption. Current Anthropology 59(suppl. 18):S105–S116.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarNader, Laura, ed. 1969. Law in culture and society. Chicago: Aldine.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarNarotsky, Susana, and Niko Besnier, eds. 2014. Crisis, value, and hope: rethinking the economy. Special issue, Current Anthropology 55(suppl. 9).First citation in articleGoogle ScholarNugent, David. 2018. Corruption now and then: managing threats to the nation in twentieth-century Peru. Current Anthropology 59(suppl. 18):S28–S36.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarOsburg, John. 2018. Making business personal: corruption, anti-corruption, and elite networks in post-Mao China. Current Anthropology 59(suppl. 18):S149–S159.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarPardo, Italo. 2018. Corrupt, abusive, and legal: Italian breaches of the democratic contract. Current Anthropology 59(suppl. 18):S60–S71.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarPartridge, Damani J., Marina Welker, and Rebecca Hardin, eds. 2011. Corporate lives: new perspectives on the social life of the corporate form. Special issue, Current Anthropology 52(suppl. 3).First citation in articleGoogle ScholarSchneider, Jane. 2018. Fifty years of mafia corruption and anti-mafia reform. Current Anthropology 59(suppl. 18):S16–S27.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarSharma, Aradhana. 2018. New brooms and old: sweeping up corruption in India, one law at a time. Current Anthropology 59(suppl. 18):S72–S82.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarShore, Cris. 2018. How corrupt are universities? audit culture, fraud prevention, and the Big Four accountancy firms. Current Anthropology 59(suppl. 18):S92–S104.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarSmart, Alan. 2018. The unbearable discretion of street-level bureaucrats: corruption and collusion in Hong Kong. Current Anthropology 59(suppl. 18):S37–S47.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarSmith, Daniel Jordan. 2018. Corruption and “culture” in anthropology and in Nigeria. Current Anthropology 59(suppl. 18):S83–S91.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarSwartz, M. J., ed. 1968. Local-level politics. Chicago: Aldine.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarTidey, Sylvia. 2018. A tale of two mayors: configurations of care and corruption in eastern Indonesian direct district head elections. Current Anthropology 59(suppl. 18):S117–S127.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarNotesDanilyn Rutherford is President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (470 Park Avenue South, 8th Floor, New York, New York 10016, USA [[email protected]]). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number S18April 2018The Anthropology of Corruption Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/696529 HistoryPublished online March 23, 2018 © 2018 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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