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The Department of Religion and Culture's Brown Bag Series Presents: Toward a Trans-cultural Model of Corruption
(Academic)
Resident's of Brazil's dry northeastern backlands mobilize multiple folk models of corruption in the accusatory arena of electoral politics. Some of these folk models originate in the region's traditional patronage structures; others have arrived more recently and reflect the ideas of liberal, socialist, and religious reformers. I argue that an ethnography of corruption in such complex contexts requires a transcultural analytic for identifying and comparing these disparate folk models. I build in this direction by positing that corruption models everywhere entail the illicit rechanneling of value from a higher to lower position along a sacred gradient. This analytic furnishes a set of terms (value, channel, sacred gradient) that allow for a systematic comparison of corruption models, their points of attachment to one another, and their popular use as tools for making sense of politics.
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