Between Morality and the Law: Corruption, Anthropology and Comparative Society

196 Pages·2004·4.49 MB·English

by  Italo Pardo

BETWEEN MORALITY AND THE LAW
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Between Morality and the Law
Corruption, Anthropology and Comparative Society
Edited by
ITALO PARDO
University of Kent, UK
First published 2004 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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to be identified as the editor of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Between morality and the law : corruption, anthropology and
comparative society
1 .Political corruption 2.Political ethics 3 .Abuse of
administrative power
I.Pardo, Italo
364.1'323
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pardo, Italo.
Between morality and the law: corruption, anthropology and comparative society/ by
Italo Pardo.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7546-4290-9
1.Political corruption. 2.Political corruption—Cross-cultural studies. 3.
Corruption. 4. Corruption—Cross-cultural studies. I. Title.
JF1081.P372004
364.1'323-dc22
2004012568
Typeset in Times New Roman by IML Typographers, Birkenhead, Merseyside
ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-4290-9 (hbk)
Contents
List of Contributors vii
1 Introduction: Corruption, Morality and the Law 1
Italo Pardo
2 Interés, Morality and Legality in Southern Spain 19
John Corbin
3 Where it Hurts: An Italian Case of Graded and Stratified Corruption 33
Italo Pardo
4 Corruption Between Morality and Legitimacy in the Context of
Globalization 53
Arcibaldo Miller
5 ‘The Devil is not as Wicked as People Believe, Neither is the Albanian’:
Corruption Between Moral Discourses and National Identity 69
Giuliana B. Prato
6 Shanghaied by the Bureaucracy: Bribery and Post-Soviet Officialdom
in Russia and Mongolia 85
Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath
7 Corruption in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan 101
Jakob Rigi
8 Rotten Talk: Corruption as a Part of Discourse in Contemporary Latvia 119
Klavs Sedlenieks
9 The ‘Cancer of Corruption’ 135
Elizabeth Harrison
10 Corruption as the Mirror of the State in Latin America 155
John Gledhill
Index 181
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List of Contributors
John Corbin is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent. He
has conducted field work in Spain over a period of more than thirty years. He is
currently preparing an anthropological study of the revolution of 1959 in the country
of his birth, Cuba. Among his main publications are Compromising Relations: Kith
Kin and Class in Andalusia; Urbane Thought: Culture and Class in an Andalusian
City, both with M. P. Corbin; and The Anarchist Passion: Class Conflict in Southern
Spain, 1810–1965.
John Gledhillis Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology at the University
of Manchester. Prof. Gledhill is a specialist on Latin America with particular
ethnographic expertise on Mexico. He is the author of Casi Nada: Agrarian Reform
in the Homeland of Cardenismo; Neoliberalism, Transnationalization and Rural
Poverty: A Case Study of Michoacan Mexico; Power and Its Disguises:
Anthropological Perspectives of Politics; and Cultura y Desaffio en Ostula
Praticando la Autonomia Indigena en la Costa Sierra Nahua de Michoacan.
Elizabeth Harrison is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex.
She has undertaken research in Southern Africa, Ethiopia, and Sri Lanka. Her
research has focused on the anthropology of development, with a particular interest in
gender and development. She is the co-author of Whose Development? An
Ethnography of Aid, Zed Books.
Caroline Humphrey is Professor of Asian Anthropology at the Department of Social
Anthropology, University of Cambridge, a fellow of the British Academy, and a
fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. She received a PhD from Cambridge in 1973.
Professor Humphrey has carried out research in Buryatia (Russia) and in Mongolia,
Nepal, India, N E China and Inner Mongolia. She is the author of: Karl Marx
Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm, Cambridge
University Press; The Archetypal Actions of Ritual(with James Laidlaw), Oxford
Univerrsity Press; Shamans and Elders, Oxford University Press and The Unmaking
of Soviet Life, Cornell University Press.
Arcibaldo Milleris a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Naples and a
Chief Executive at the Italian Ministry of Justice. His work as a jurist has spanned
several decades and he has practised for many years as a Judge. Dr Miller has
published numerous essays and critical works on criminal law and the process of
legislation and has contributed to volumes on legitimacy and on corruption.
Italo Pardo is Honorary Reader in Social Angthropology and a Fellow of Eliot
viii Between Morality and the Law
College at the University of Kent. Dr Pardo has carried out extended field research in
Italy and England. He is the author of Managing Existence in Naples: Morality,
Action, and Structure, Cambridge University Press; and Elite senza fiducia:
ideologie, etiche di potere, legittimità, Catanzaro: Rubbettino. Dr Pardo has edited
Moral of Legitimacy: Between Agency and the System, Oxford Berghahn and several
works on legislation and corruption.
Giuliana B. Pratois Honorary Research Fellow and part-time Lecturer in Social
Anthropology at the University of Kent. She is co-Chairperson of the Commission on
Urban Anthropology of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological
Sciences. Dr Prato has carried out field research in England, Italy and Albania. She
has published widely on Italy and Albania. She has contributed to volumes on the
politics of the environment and on legitimacy, corruption and law. Her edited volume
on Political Ideology, Citizenship and Identity: Anthropological Approachesis in
publication with Florence University Press and she is editing a volume titled
Multicultural Citiesand a Special Issue of the journal Heterotites on Ethnicity.
Jakob Rigi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Cornell University. He has
carried out fieldwork in Kazakhstan and Russia. Dr Rigi is the author of Post-Soviet
Chaos: Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan, London: Pluto Press.
Klavs Sedlenieksis a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Latvia. He holds
an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and is
completing a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Latvia. Klavs
Sedlenieks is one of the founders of the Latvian Association of Anthropologists and a
member of the North and East/Central European network for Qualitative Research
(NECEN). He has undertaken fieldwork in Latvia and Montenegro. His recent
publications on corruption include Corruption in the Process of Issuing Building
Permits, Providus, Riga (2004) and ‘Corruption as Witchcraft for Contemporary
Latvia’, www.anthrobase.com (2002).
David Sneath is the Director of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at
Cambridge University and a lecturer in Social Anthropology. He is a Fellow at
Corpus Christi College where he is Deputy Tutor for Advanced Students and Director
of Studies in Archaeology and Anthropology. Dr Sneath has carried out extended
fieldwork in Mongolia, China. He is a co-editor of the journal Inner Asia. His recent
publications include: Changing Inner Mongolia: Pastoral Mongolian Society and the
Chinese State, Oxford University Press and The End of Nomadism? Society, State
and the Environment in Inner Asia(with C. Humphrey), Duke University Press.
Chapter 1
Introduction: Corruption, Morality
and the Law
Italo Pardo
Abuses of power are almost certainly present in all systems where there are marked
asymmetries of power. Perhaps inseparable from the modern state and from a
Weberian rational-legal bureaucratic authority, this key aspect of the kind of
corruption which Friedrich (1989, p.19) describes as a ‘political pathology’affects
most profoundly associated life and the relationship between citizens and the state. In
its most basic form, abuse of power in public life is characterized by the sale of the
functions of the office. It consists of actions, or the failure to take actions, that favour
selected individuals or groups in exchange for money or other returns, such as the
expectation of a job, a favour or political support. This last case especially
characterizes modern societies where politics and bureaucracy intermingle as a
distinctive form of corruption of the democratic system.
The nature, dynamics and ramifications of abuses of power and corruption extend,
however, far beyond such basic definition. The mismanagement of responsibility in
the exercise of bureaucratic, economic and political power at various levels, of which
corruption and abuse are critical aspects, involve moral choices that are often part of
wider frameworks and modes of exchange. That the problematic of moral choice
extends both to the corrupt actions of ordinary people and to the legislative process
only strengthens the point that these complexities badly need to be understood
empirically. The task of developing an ethnographic study of corruption is certainly
made difficult by the complexity and elusive nature of this phenomenon; however,
anthropologists are particularly well equipped to meet such a challenge.
Our concern in this volume at once includes and goes beyond the strictly legalistic
view. Drawing on detailed ethnographies, we address illegal forms of corruption
and, more widely, moral and legal forms of corruption, bearing in mind that these
are shadowy fields of activity that often defy precise categorization. This neces-
sary clarification would basically justify using the word corruption in inverted
commas.
The Problematic of Defining Corruption
The discussions that follow, interdisciplinary debate developed over the years
through round-tables, seminars and conferences, and the large literature on this
subject (a selection of which is cited in this Introduction) meet the important point