Claim OwnershipUnder The Table: An Anthropology of Corruption Podcast
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We are two cultural anthropologists, Drs. Aaron Ansell and Sylvia Tidey, who write about corruption and the fight against corruption in non-Western cultural settings. Our lighthearted podcast consists of interviews with fellow experts on this topic. We try to keep it jargon-free, but we do geek out every now and then, so fair warning.
11 Episodes
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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 trans...
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 lega...
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 Indi...
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 som...
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 ab...
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 of corruption or abuses of power that do not technically break the law, but that do break ci...
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 subversi...
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 relations...
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 ...
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 Stat...
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 Disillusion (2021) that explores how ordinary Argentines talk about and diagnose the problem of cor...
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