Corruption in politics and business is, after war, perhaps the greatest threat to democracy. Academic studies of corruption tend to come from the field of International Relations, analysing systems of formal rules and institutions. This book offers a radically different perspective -- it shows how anthropology can throw light on aspects of corruption that remain unexamined in international relations. The contributors reveal how corruption operates through informal rules, personal connections and the wider social contexts that govern everyday practices. They argue that patterns of corruption are part of the fabric of everyday life -- wherever we live -- and subsequently they are often endemic in our key institutions. The book examines corruption across a range of different contexts from transitional societies such as post-Soviet Russia and Romania, to efforts to reform or regulate institutions that are perceived to be potentially corrupt, such as the European Commission. The book also covers the Enron and WorldCom scandals, the mafia in Sicily and the USA, and the world of anti-corruption as represented by NGOs like Transparency International.

Dieter Haller is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His fo cus is on political anthropology, borderland studies, gender, and the Mediterranean. Cris Shore is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Auckland. He is author of Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (Routledge) and co-editor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies (Pluto Press).

CONTRIBUTORS

Dorle Dracklé is Professor of Social Anthropology and Intercultural

Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. Her current fi eldwork

in Portugal focuses on elites, corruption, economy and the European

Union. She is also interested in media, science and technology

studies, economy, politics and policy, and the teaching and learning

of anthropology. Recent publications include: The Rhetorics of Crisis:

On the Cultural Poetics of Politics, Bureaucracy and Virtual Economy in

Southern Portugal (in German, 2004), Current Policies and Practices in

European Social Anthropology Education (ed. with Iain Edgar, 2004),

Educational Histories of European Social Anthropology (ed. with Iain

Edgar and Thomas Schippers, 2003), Images of Death (in German, ed.,

2001); and various articles, among others on media anthropology,

multicultural media, life course, and suicide.

Akhil Gupta is associate professor of anthropology at Stanford

University, California. His research interests are currently focused on

a project on the ethnography of the state in India and environmental

history. He is the author of Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the

Making of Modern India (1998) and co-editor of several books including

Caste and Outcast (with Gordon Chang and Purnima Mankekar, 2002),

Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science

(1997) and Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology

(1997) (both with James Ferguson).

Dieter Haller (PhD 1991 Heidelberg, Habil. 1999 Frankfurt/Oder),

cultural and social anthropologist, is Adjunct Associate Professor

at the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas/

Austin. He has worked as Guest Professor in Frankfurt/Main (2000),

Hamburg (2001), Granada (2002) and as Theodor-Heuss Lecturer at

New School University/New York (2003). His main fields of interest

are port cities, borderlands, diaspora, ethnicity, Gibraltar, Spain

and the Mediterranean. His latest publications are a monograph

on Gibraltar (Gelebte Grenze Gibraltar, Wiesbaden: Deutscher

Universitätsverlag, 2000), a special issue of Ethnologia Europaea on

‘Border Anthropology’ (co-edited with Hastings Donnan, 2000), an

introduction to cultural anthropology (DTV-Atlas zur Ethnologie,

München, forthcoming 2004/05)

Sian Lazar is currently Research Offi cer at the Centre for Latin

American Studies, University of Cambridge. She completed her

PhD at Goldsmiths College, London University, with a thesis on

citizenship, personhood and political agency among rural–urban

migrants in El Alto, Bolivia. She is co-author, with Maxine Molyneux,

of Doing the Rights Thing: Rights-based Development and Latin American

NGOs (ITDG Publishing, London, 2003).

David W. Lovell is an Associate Professor in Politics and currently

Acting Rector of the University of New South Wales at the Australian

Defence Force Academy. During the early 1990s, he edited the Political

Theory Newsletter, and was managing editor of the Australian Journal of

Political Science. In 1992, he was the Australian Parliamentary Political

Science Fellow, and since 1993 he has been a member of the Executive

Committee of the International Society for the Study of European

Ideas, and is on the editorial board of its journal, The European Legacy.

In 2001, he was part of the Australian government’s delegation to

The Hague for the Second Global Forum on Fighting Corruption and

Safeguarding Integrity. His books include From Marx to Lenin (1984);

Marx’s Proletariat (1988); The Theory of Politics (co-authored, 1991);

The Transition from Socialism (co-edited, 1992); Marxism and Australian

Socialism (1997); The Australian Political System (co-authored, 1998);

The Transition: Evaluating the Postcommunist Experience (ed., 2002);

and Asia-Pacifi c Security: Policy Challenges (ed., 2003).

Carol MacLennan is an anthropologist at Michigan Tech University.

Previously she worked in the US Department of Transportation on

automotive regulation. She has published articles on government

regulation, corporate infl uence in democratic decision-making, and

industrial communities, and is a co-author of The State and Democracy:

Revitalizing America’s Government (with Mark Levine, Charles Noble

and John Kushma, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988). She is currently

completing writing projects on the history of corporate control over

the landscapes of sugar and mining communities.

Michele Rivkin-Fish is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the

University of Kentucky. Her work examines gender, health and

health care, reproductive politics, and international development

in Russia. Her research has been published in the journals American

Anthropologist, Social Science and Medicine, and Culture, Medicine, and

Psychiatry.

Steven Sampson is a social anthropologist at the University of Lund,

with research and consulting experience in Romania, Albania, Bosnia

and Kosovo. His work focuses on the role of NGOs and civil society,

on ‘project life’ in developmental contexts, and on democracy export. His current project concerns the anti-corruption movement

in the Balkans.

Jane Schneider teaches anthropology at the City University of New

York Graduate Center. She is the co-editor, with Annette B. Weiner,

of Cloth and Human Experience (1987), and the author of several

essays on cloth and clothing. Her anthropological fi eld research has

been in Sicily and has led to three books, co-authored with Peter

Schneider: Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily (1976);

Festival of the Poor: Fertility Decline and the Ideology of Class in Sicily

(1996); and Reversible Destiny: Mafi a, Antimafi a and the Struggle for

Palermo (forthcoming). In 1998, she edited Italy’s Southern Question;

Orientalism in One Country.

Peter Schneider teaches sociology at Fordham University. He is coauthor,

with Jane Schneider, of Culture and Political Economy in Western

Sicily (1976); Festival of the Poor: Fertility Decline and the Ideology of Class

in Sicily (1996); and Reversible Destiny: Mafi a, Antimafi a and the Struggle

for Palermo (forthcoming). He is pursuing his interests in organized

crime and criminalization through research on Youngstown, Ohio,

and as a founding member of a new section on these issues at the

New York Academy of Sciences.

Cris Shore is professor of anthropology at the University of Auckland,

New Zealand. He is co-editor, with Stephen Nugent, of Anthropology

of Elites (2002) and Anthropology and Cultural Studies (1997), with

Susan Wright, of Anthropology of Policy (1997) and with Akbar Ahmed

of The Future of Anthropology (1995). His work focuses on issues in

political anthropology, policy and governance. He has carried out

anthropological fi eldwork in Italy, from which he wrote Italian

Communism: The Escape from Lenin (1990), and more recently among

EU civil servants in Brussels, which led to the book Building Europe:

The Cultural Politics of European Integration (2000). His current interest

is in the politics of accountability and the rise of ‘audit culture’.

Filippo M. Zerilli is currently researcher and lecturer at the

University of Cagliari where he teaches cultural anthropology. He

also teaches ethnographic research methods at the University of

Perugia. Since 1996 he has been conducting extensive fi eldwork

in Romania exploring privatization and property issues. His main

research interests include the history of anthropology, postsocialism,

ethnography of law and human rights, changing property relations,

the emotional and moral dimension of ownership claims. Among his

publications are: Il lato oscuro dell’etnologia (CISU: Rome, 1998), and

the edited collection Dalle ‘Regole’ al ‘Suicidio’: Percorsi durkheimiani

(Argo: Lecce, 2001). He is the co-editor of Incontri di etnologia europea.

European Ethnology Meetings (Edizioni Scientifi che Italiane: Naples, 1998), and of La ricerca antropologica in Romania: Prospettive storiche

ed etnografi che (Edizioni Scientifi che Italiane: Naples, 2003). He is

presently preparing a book focusing on the property restitution

debates in postsocialist Romania.

Dorothy Louise Zinn (PhD in Social-Cultural Anthropology at the

University of Texas at Austin) is an independent scholar and adjunct

instructor at the Università degli Studi della Basilicata. Her areas

of interest include political economy, patronage, immigration and

multiculturalism. Along with numerous academic articles, she has

published the volume La Raccomandazione (Rome: Donzelli, 2001),

which was awarded the Pitré Prize for anthropological works. Dr

Zinn’s other professional activities include anthropological translation

and collaboration with the award-winning Associazione Tolbà

(<www.associazionetolba.org>) to assist immigrants and promote

intercultural dialogue.