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 Brazi l (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 unpa...

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 "a...

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...

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.  G uanxi  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 squat...

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 scheme...

Aaron and Sylvia talk with Italo Pardo about the importance of empirically-grounded anthropological studies of corruption. As one of the earliest anthropologists committed to the explicit study of corruption, Italo draws on his work in both Italy and the UK to illustrate his attention to the interplay between legality, legitimacy, and morality.  Of particular interest to Italo are those instances...

Sylvia and Aaron interview Professor Michael Herzfeld about his latest book, Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritag e. 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...

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 Par...

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...

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 Ever...

In our inaugural episode, we talk with Dr. Sarah Muir of the The City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Sarah is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist specializing in Argentina and a long-time advocate for a systematic, anthropological study of corruption. During the podcast, we discuss Sarah’s recent book Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Di...