Anthropology of Corruption
Authors: Hasty Jennifer 
Published: November 2024

Corruption has become an essential rationale for explaining failures of governance and development, particularly for countries outside of Europe and North America. Wherever societies fail to thrive, politically or economically, politicians and policy analysts summon the notion of corruption to explain why. Corruption is cited as a central contributor to poverty, inequality, lawlessness, ethnic factionalism, weak institutions, and military coups. In countries throughout the world, the news media is dominated by sensational investigative stories exposing bribery, extortion, and embezzlement among elites and government officials. In popular culture and everyday conversations, citizens in these countries express profound dissatisfaction with the frustrations of corrupt processes and crooked officials. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the study of corruption has been dominated by the discipline of political science. Using normative models, political scientists categorize distinctive forms of corruption, document consequences, and diagnose causes, suggesting possible solutions. Following this path, scholars from other social-scientific disciplines, such as economics, area studies, international development, and public policy, similarly approach corruption as a kind of scholarly mystery, looking for clues and correlations in data sets and comparative case studies. The central aim of this scholarship is to find some key culprit that might explain why some societies suffer so much corruption and how they/we might put a stop to it. Anthropologists frequently become fascinated by the public fascinations of the people around them—that is, while conducting immersive, long-term fieldwork on one topic, an anthropologist may realize that people in the surrounding society are much more interested in something else. As preoccupation with corruption has surged in local, national, and global discourses throughout the neoliberal period, a growing number of anthropologists have turned their scholarly attention to the ubiquitous discourses of corruption, exploring the multiple meanings and uses of the concept. The disciplinary commitment to holism motivates anthropologists to explore how the discourses and practices of corruption intersect with other sociocultural realms, including morality, kinship, politics, the state, and economic processes. Relativism encourages anthropologists to set aside condemnations of corruption to explore alternative ways of understanding the actors, practices, and institutions deemed corrupt. In contrast to the normative scholarship from political science and other disciplines, the anthropology of corruption avoids the diagnostic approach of causes and consequences, aiming instead at exploring corruption as a cultural predicament, a complex and elusive problem that seems to defy solution. This bibliography focuses on recent work in the anthropology of corruption, particularly scholarship published over the past decade or so. While several general overviews already trace the anthropology of corruption from the 1990s into the 2010s, the explosion of scholarship since the early 2010s calls for an updated synthesis highlighting new perspectives and arguments. Exceptions are made for earlier works that are particularly seminal or unusual.