“Corruption and “Culture” in Anthropology and in Nigeria”

Abstract

This article examines the process of publication and reception of the author’s book about corruption in Nigeria as a form of ethnographic evidence that is useful to interrogate the fraught relationship between the concepts of culture and corruption. The evidence points to multiple misunderstandings—but also to the powerful political purposes for which accusations of corruption (and, more specifically, notions of corruption as a “cultural “ problem) can be wielded. The essay builds work in anthropology that takes seriously the reality that the people we study may read what we write, and uses local reactions to a monograph about corruption as analytical leverage to illuminate the anthropology of corruption. But the article takes the examination of local responses to a book about corruption one step further, comparing them to the reception and critiques generated within anthropology. The author argues that in juxtaposing these reactions we can see the many ways that concepts of corruption and culture—and the understanding of the relationship between the two—can be mobilized for different purposes and with different effects.

In 2007, Princeton University Press published my first book, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria. The book examined the seeming paradox that ordinary Nigerians are at once victims, vocal critics, and complicit participants in Nigeria’s infamous corruption. I argued that in Nigeria the term corruption is a widely accepted, polyvalent signifier for a range of political, social, and cultural practices related to the reproduction of inequality, about Nigerians are highly ambivalent.

On a mid-December morning in 2013, roughly seven years after my book about corruption in Nigeria was first published (Smith 2007), and by which time I thought I had experienced all the reactions that it would produce, I received a letter in my anthropology department mailbox that totally upended that assumption. It was in a thick envelope and the return address showed it came from the office of a lawyer in southern California who bore a Nigerian name. As I read the nine-page single-spaced letter my initial intrigue quickly transformed into mortification. The lawyer represented a Nigerian doctor who had run a state-level AIDS program in my field site. My book recounted things that some of my interlocutors in a local NGO had said about his actions with regard to a World Bank-funded call for proposals in which local NGOs would compete for small grants. I described how people had told me that the doctor felt obliged to award one of the grants to an NGO created by the state governor’s wife, and how the doctor himself was interested in creating his own NGO (even though he was a government official and had a hand in awarding the grants). The story took up only two pages in my book, and although I was simply reporting what others had told me, rather than attempting to prove its veracity, there is little doubt that the passages implied the doctor might have engaged in corruption. The lawyer’s letter informed me that unless I made a public apology, worked with Princeton University Press to recall all copies of the book and print a new edition that included a retraction, and paid the doctor a half a million dollars, they would sue me. The letter was copied to the Director of Princeton University Press.

The first thing I did was regret using the doctor’s real name in my book. My general practice was to use pseudonyms for everyone but public officials. The doctor was a public official, but a minor enough figure that I could have saved both him and me a lot of heartache by giving him another name, and maybe changing the details of the story a little to protect his identity. But I hadn’t done that, even though I had done so in many other cases that involved ordinary citizens. The next thing I did was to make an appointment with my university’s general counsel. She was both reassuring and frightening. She was reassuring in that she said that in the United States libel cases were difficult to prove. From what she could glean, the doctor had a very weak case. But what she said frightened me on two counts. First, to my horror, she said that the university would not provide any legal representation on my behalf. Because I had published the book with Princeton University Press, my legal relationship in the matter was with the press rather than with the university. That provided me no comfort initially, because when I reread my contract with the press (which I did not read with great care before I signed) it said that I would be responsible not only for any costs I might incur in such a case, but also that I might be responsible for Princeton’s costs. The university lawyer said that was typical legal language but she imagined that in fact the press would back me up. Presses have a huge vested interest in protecting freedom of expression, she said, and they would almost surely support me. I was glad for those words, but I hadn’t talked to the press yet and I barely slept that night.

The second thing the university lawyer said that scared me was that while she could assure me that the case appeared to have little merit in American law, she could make no such claims about other countries, where libel laws might be much more friendly to the plaintive. Pointedly, she said the situation might be entirely different in Nigeria. My mind churned and recoiled at the thought of what it might be like to try to defend myself against a libel suit in the Nigerian judicial system.

The next day I received an email from the Director of Princeton University Press referencing the letter from the Nigerian lawyer and asking me to call him. After asking lots of questions about my book, about the doctor who threatened to sue me, and about the specific relevant passages in the book (which he had read before we spoke), he informed me (to my great relief) that the press retained a law firm for precisely such circumstances. Further, if necessary, their lawyer would represent both the press and me. I should expect to hear from the lawyer shortly, he said.

Within a few days, a phone call was arranged with a lawyer from a major New York firm, who was trained at Columbia University. Like the director of the press, she also asked me all kinds of questions about my book, about the doctor, and specifically about the passages in the book over which he threatened to sue me. Within a week or so she produced a three-page, single-spaced response to the letter from the Nigerian lawyer threatening a lawsuit. Her letter debased the claims of libel on three primary grounds, in addition to the fact that in U.S law it would have been beyond the statue of limitations: 1) that what I had written was true; 2) that when I wrote it I believed it to be true; and 3) that what I had written had caused the doctor no demonstrable monetary harm. The first two points were backed up by extensive evidence that I provided to the lawyer. Among the most important evidence I offered was that one of the sources for what I wrote in the book about the doctor later co-authored with me a chapter in another book recounting the same story. In other words, one of my informants added his name to a published piece, thereby buttressing my claim that I had every reason to believe what I wrote was true. All of this thoroughly undermined any potential libel case, the lawyer said. If the doctor brought his case against me to court in the U.S., he would lose, she assured me. But she also cautioned me that many frivolous libel cases are filed with the hope that the defendant would agree to a settlement to avoid the hassle and the costs of court. Further, she echoed the Brown University lawyer in cautioning me that things might be entirely different in Nigeria.

After the press’s lawyer sent the letter to the Nigerian lawyer in California nothing happened. A couple of moths later I had more or less stopped worrying about a lawsuit—though I was still afraid that on my next trip to Nigeria the doctor might try to sue me there, or worse. Then, one morning I arrived at my office and opened my email to find half-a-dozen emails with the subject line “DANIEL JORDAN SMITH IS A LIAR AND AN ACADEMIC FRAUD.” The doctor had sent the emails to Brown’s president, to every member of my department, as well as again to Princeton University Press. The first email made the same claims of defamation contained in the Nigerian lawyer’s original letter. The subsequent emails each contained about a dozen attachments, which the doctor called “supporting documents” for his claim, all of which appeared to be photocopies of project documents associated with the World Bank grant competition that the doctor had overseen.

I forwarded everything to the university’s general counsel and l asked her advice, and specifically about whether I should reach out to Brown’s president (I had already told most, but not all, of my department colleagues about the threatened lawsuit). She told me she had already explained everything to the president and she advised me not to respond to any of the doctor’s emails. I followed her advice, but I did write a note to all my colleagues in the department to apologize for and explain the barrage of emails and attachments they had received from the doctor. People wrote back in sympathy and several said they’d assumed the emails were some kind of scam like those I’d written about in my book. They had deleted the messages immediately, daring not to open any of the attachments.

While I was furious at the doctor for his actions, afraid what he might have in store for me in Nigeria, and concerned that even though his accusations were baseless they might still smear my reputation, I also found myself troubled about the ethics of the whole situation, including my own behavior. The worst thing that happened was that the whole incident poisoned my relationship with my friend and colleague in Nigeria—the man who had been one of my main informants, and who had co-authored the chapter in another volume that included material corroborating what I’d written in my book. I believe the doctor only realized my friend’s central role in the story when the press’s lawyer cited that chapter in her rebuttal to the Nigerian lawyer’s original threats. In my haste to defend myself I had not fully realized the implications for my friend when I cited him and our jointly authored chapter as evidence against the notion that I had fabricated a libelous story about the doctor. It also made me realize that I had not adequately considered the risks that telling the story in my book might pose to the people who shared that information with me.

My friend eventually wrote letters to the doctor’s boss (the state ministry of health) and to the press repudiating his authorship of our chapter. It was an absurd claim—he and I exchanged numerous emails as we worked on the chapter; he had signed an author’s agreement form; I remember how proud he was when I brought him two copies of the edited volume after it was published—but I heard from mutual friends and colleagues in Nigeria that the doctor had threatened him. I felt disappointed and betrayed, but of course I also realized that in some profound way I had betrayed my friend as well, by using the publication of our chapter in my defense, thereby exposing him to the doctor, and probably by telling the story in my book in the first place.

I interpreted the actions of the doctor as an example of “when corruption fights back” (Adebanwi and Obadare 2011). Whatever sympathy I’ve developed over the years for the pressures that Nigerian elites experience to engage in corruption (the pressure the doctor felt to award one of the NGO grants to the governor’s wife’s organization was an example) no longer applied to the doctor after his withering attacks on me. But I remain deeply saddened and feel a tremendous amount of guilt (as well as some anger) toward my former friend and colleague. He lied about me to protect himself. But I put him in a position where perhaps he had no choice.

While the most painful part of the entire episode was the destruction of a friendship, over time I also thought a lot more about what this incident revealed about the anthropology of corruption. I decided to write a book about corruption in Nigeria, and to insist on calling the phenomenon I was studying corruption, because Nigerians are unrelenting in their belief that corruption is one of the biggest problems in their society. But the threatened lawsuit and its fallout made me think again about the ethics of fieldwork, writing, and representation; about the various dimensions of power and inequality at work not only in practices of corruption itself, but also in the study of it; and about potent role that accusations of corruption play in politics—in Nigeria, and in Nigeria’s relationship to the rest of the world.

With regard to the ethics of fieldwork, writing, and representation, as I alluded to earlier, I collected most of the material for my book while I was ostensibly working on other projects. It was only in retrospect that I realized I had so much “data” about corruption. I had not intended to collect it, except during a last stint of fieldwork before writing the book. Had my research been more unethical because people did not know that things they were telling me were for research and would be published in a book? Nearly every anthropologist who has submitted a protocol to an Institutional Review Board (IRB) has faced the challenge of how to address the issue of consent with regard to participant observation. I assume that I am like most anthropologists in that I tend to think of every minute I am in Nigeria as fieldwork and participant observation. The idea of seeking “consent” for every moment of social interaction seems impossible, even absurd. And yet in retrospect I wonder if it was ethical to describe the things I observed or report conversations I heard without the explicit consent of the people involved, even if each person was protected with a pseudonym and stories were slightly altered to protect people’s identities. Of course in the case of the doctor and my friend the worry was more concrete. In hindsight, I made a mistake in using the doctor’s real name, even though he may have fit the criterion of being public figure that I (and many others) used in making such decisions. Perhaps I also made a mistake in citing the co-authored chapter to defend myself against the accusation of libel. Even though I firmly believe what I wrote was true, and even though the co-authored chapter provided legal evidence that I had every reason to believe what I wrote in my book to be true, just because I told the truth does not mean what I did was right.

My interpretation that the doctor’s actions were an example of corruption fighting back, and my belief that my friend turned against me because the doctor threatened him (indeed, I would not be surprised if he threatened not only his livelihood, but also his life) provide me a degree of respite from my own sense of guilt. They also temper my feeling of betrayal by my friend. But that relief is only partial because I imagine that he must feel betrayed by me as well. Although I have often thought, “if only I had disguised the doctor’s identity, this whole ugly mess could have been avoided,” and although I think that is probably true, I also believe that such ethical issues are perhaps too easily papered over by the conventions by which an IRB protocol can be approved and by which anthropologists typically try protect our subjects in our writing.

With regard to the anthropology of corruption in particular, the whole ordeal reinforced for me how powerful accusations of corruption are in Nigeria, even if they appear to leave many elite politicians unscathed. In his recent book about the history of corruption in Nigeria, Steven Pierce (2016) argues that accusations of corruption have evolved to become a central weapon in Nigerian politics. Despite the widely shared sense that nearly every politician is engaged in corruption, official accusations of corruption can have powerful consequences, partly because they enable the machinery of the state to be used against some while protecting others, but also because, despite its ubiquity, corruption is highly stigmatized. Indeed, it was the paradox of almost universal participation in corruption even though it is so thoroughly despised that led me to write my book in the first place.

The doctor’s threatened lawsuit also reminded me of the way that accusations of corruption operate in an unequal world. Although I am convinced that his libel accusations against me had no merits, I also couldn’t help notice the degree to which Nigeria’s reputation for corruption played a role in protecting me, if not legally (because of course the case never went to court), at least with regard to my reputation. While I would like to think I have earned the credibility and deserve the trust of my university, my department colleagues, and Princeton University Press, it is nonetheless remarkable how much the fact that the accusations against me came from a Nigerian affected everyone’s interpretation. The idea that a public figure there would be corrupt was assumed. Further, when my university colleagues received the mass emails with the subject line that I was a liar and an academic fraud, along with the dozens of attachments, it was telling that many of them assumed it was some kind of scam letter, and they never dared open any of the documents. While I am of course grateful that people believed me, even without really considering any evidence, I could not help but wonder whether the stigma of corruption in Nigeria and the role that such stigma plays in reinforcing our ideas about the global hierarchy would have made it impossible for the doctor to effectively pursue a case against me, even if everything he accused me of had, in fact, been true.

Problematizing Corruption and Culture

In retrospect some of my initial experiences in writing and publishing a book about corruption in Nigeria should have better prepared me for the challenges and quandaries that the doctor’s allegations presented me with. The process of publication and the reception that my book received after it came out offered their own forms of ethnographic evidence about the fraught relationship between the concepts of culture and corruption, but also regarding issues of ethics and representation when writing about such a politically charged topic. This evidence pointed to multiple misunderstandings—but also to the powerful political purposes for which accusations of corruption (and, more specifically, notions of corruption as a “cultural” problem) can be wielded. I build on work in anthropology that takes seriously the reality that the people we study may read what we write (Brettell 1993), and particularly on Dorothy Zinn’s (2013) recent effort to use local reactions to her ethnography of corruption in Italy as a further corpus of ethnographic evidence and analytical leverage to illuminate the anthropology of corruption. But in this article I take the examination of local responses to my book about corruption one step further, comparing them to the reception and critiques generated within anthropology. I argue that in juxtaposing these reactions we can see the multiple ways that the concepts of corruption and culture—and the understanding of the relationship between the two—can be mobilized for different purposes and with different effects. The ethical quandary produced by the doctor’s threatened lawsuit against me was in some ways a culmination of issues I had already confronted in the reception of my book. Even before I received that letter, it had become clear that in writing about corruption the ethics of representation inevitably collide with the political uses of corruption and corruption accusations in creating, navigating, and explaining inequality.

In 2007, I traveled to Nigeria with about 30 copies of my book stuffed in my luggage, earmarked for in-laws, friends, and academic colleagues. Many people in the United States had asked me whether I would be afraid to return to Nigeria once the book was in print, given the politically sensitive nature of the topic. I always replied that I was not particularly scared for three reasons. First, I wrote little that was directly threatening to political elites. In fact, my book was really about the ways that ordinary people participated paradoxically in corruption, even as they were also its primary victims and its most vocal critics (Smith 2007). Second, the Nigerian press had long disseminated much more damning and sensational accounts of corruption than anything that I portrayed (Obadare 2009, 2016; see Hasty 2005 for Ghanaian examples). Consequently, I doubted anything I wrote would garner much notice among corrupt Nigerian elites. Finally, no matter how outlandish or credible the accusations of corruption against individual Nigerians might be, it is remarkable how meager the consequences always are (Gore and Pratten 2003). If Nigerian corruption and corrupt Nigerian politicians were immune to the torrent of media stories and popular rumors and complaints generated within the country, there was little to fear, I thought in 2007, from an academic anthropology book published across the Atlantic.

Still, as I approached customs officials outside the baggage claim area at Murtala Mohammed International Airport in Lagos I could feel the sweat accumulating on my brow as I began to imagine their possible reaction to seeing so many colorful book covers with the bold title “A Culture of Corruption.” Given that more innocuous contents in my luggage had caused me many delays on arrival over the years—as officers engaged in a painstaking examination of my bags, hoping that I would offer some kind of “dash” to speed things up—I was afraid that 30 copies of my book would create a big opportunity for them and a gigantic hassle for me. So as I approached the uniformed officers I adopted an air of confidence, greeting them heartily in Pidgin English and adding Igbo for the man whose nametag revealed his origin in Nigeria’s East. It always seemed like customs officers, police, scam artists, and even market vendors could sense whether foreigners were new, naïve, and vulnerable, or more savvy veterans who knew Nigeria. Whether my feigned confidence had its intended effect or I was just lucky (customs officers don’t have time to search everyone’s baggage) I’ll never know, but they waived me through without opening my bags.

While my airport arrival produced a very short period of angst about whether the copies of my book would result in being questioned, extorted for hefty bribe, or even detained, once the books were safely in country, I began the exciting, but also anxiety-producing, process of distributing copies. What would people think? Would they be offended by the title (which was not the title I originally proposed to my press, and about which I myself was deeply ambivalent)? Would they think I had somehow besmirched Nigeria—or insulted them—by writing about an issue for which Nigeria already had such a bad global reputation? Might they—as I hoped—be pleased that the book examined corruption in Nigeria in a way that attempted to privilege ordinary people’s perspectives? And regardless of whether they liked the fact that I had written an ethnographic account of corruption, would they think that what I wrote was accurate?

Already by the time I reached Nigeria late that spring, I had begun to receive feedback from the scholarly world of anthropology, and there would be much more to come in the ensuing years, both positive and negative, even before the doctor’s threat of a lawsuit. While the academic reception of the book was obviously important for my professional career, what my affines, friends, and colleagues in Nigeria thought affected me much more personally. I knew I would experience Nigerian feedback about the book differently than how I received academic criticism or commendation. But what I did not anticipate was how much more I would learn about corruption, and about its relationship to culture, by comparing and contrasting the reactions to the book in academic anthropology and among Nigerians themselves. Of course, responses to the book were diverse in both the academy and in Nigeria. But the worries, themes, issues, and questions that stood out in each realm signaled strikingly different perspectives and preoccupations.

Rather than privileging one set of responses as more revealing or accurate than the other, I argue that by comparing them it is possible to understand things about corruption, about the anthropology of corruption, and about the perceived relationship between corruption and culture both in the academy and in Nigeria that one might miss—or at least that I certainly missed—in constructing an account that did not benefit from the reactions of these different audiences.

Corruption and Culture in Anthropology

In 2005, when I submitted the manuscript of my book to Princeton University Press for peer review, my working title was “The Nigerian Factor: Corruption and Its Discontents.” The Nigerian Factor was a popular local expression to signal or explain corruption. The subtitle was meant to suggest that the book was as much about Nigerians’ anger over corruption as about their involvement in it. But once the book was under contract my editor informed me that the marketing department rejected my title and requested that I come up with something else. The Nigerian Factor, I was told, would not be meaningful to non-specialists and I needed something with broader appeal. It was hard for me to let go, but I accepted the advice and proposed “Corruption and Its Discontents: Everyday Deception and Popular Anger in Nigeria.” That too was rejected (though I was told that the subtitle was acceptable).

My editor asked me to suggest a bunch of other options for the marketing folks to consider. I sent about a dozen variations. To my chagrin, they preferred one of the versions about which I had the greatest ambivalence: “A Culture of Corruption.” I was told they liked it because it was precise enough to convey the focus of the book, broad enough to have wider appeal, and provocative enough to peak interest. To me, pairing culture and corruption in the title presented considerable problems. First, I knew well that in anthropology many people believed that corruption was a stigmatizing Western label that oversimplified more complex social practices (I have more to say about this below). Second, I was well aware that the concept of culture itself was contested in the very discipline that took it as its object of study. But much worse, the title “A Culture of Corruption” could be seen as suggesting that the book would offer a “culturalist” argument, in which corruption in Nigeria would be blamed on some kind of traditional or naturalized notion of “Nigerian culture.” That was the last thing I wanted to suggest with my book title, much less argue in the ethnography.

I raised these issues with my editor, and while he expressed some sympathy, he suggested that I should leave the marketing of my book to the people who know how to do that and that I should feel confident that my scholarship would by judged on its merits, not by the book’s title. I accepted this reasoning and approved moving forward. In part I succumbed because I did not feel I had much power. I was in the fourth year of a tenure-track position and needed my book to come out soon. But it was not only my urgency and perception of powerlessness that led me to accept the title. I wrote the book the way I did in the first place because I was struck by how obsessed Nigerians were with the problem of corruption in their society. Even though Nigerian corruption has many of its roots in colonialism and despite the fact that the term is deployed in global political and development discourse in stigmatizing ways that blame the victims, it was obvious to me that Nigerians understood corruption as something profoundly real and consequential in their society, and they saw themselves as deeply implicated in it. Further, with regard to the concept of culture, despite its misuses, a version that accounts for history and political economy and which includes institutions and practices as well as beliefs and symbols still appealed to me, despite its slipperiness. So while I sometimes still wince at the title of my book, ultimately I am responsible for it. In retrospect, reactions to the title in particular have been emblematic of what I have learned about corruption, about the relationship between the concepts of culture and corruption, and about the anthropology of corruption overall based on responses to the book more generally in the academy and in Nigeria.

Two anecdotes represent widespread perspectives in academic anthropology regarding corruption, and specifically regarding the relationship between corruption and culture. The first happened shortly after the book came out. I was invited to Cambridge University in the U.K., where I actually gave two talks—one in African Studies and one in Social Anthropology. Although I presented somewhat different lectures to each audience, they both covered the main arguments in my book. It was, in part, the contrast between the reception to my work and the questions I received in each venue that pointed to some patterns I have observed more widely in academic anthropology’s point of view on corruption.

After the African Studies lecture, where the audience was almost entirely Africanists from multiple disciplines, and included several Nigeria experts, the most critical questions focused on the extent to which I had taken proper account of history and whether or not I had given adequate weight to factors in the global political economy in my explanation of corruption in Nigeria. These seemed like immanently appropriate questions that probed what I think were weaknesses in my book. But no one seemed concerned about calling the phenomenon I was examining “corruption.”

In contrast, after the talk in Social Anthropology, both in the formal question and discussion period and at an informal reception afterwards, several people were concerned—indeed some seemed downright angry—that I had decided to call what I was studying “corruption.” Their discontent seemed to stem from two main worries. The first was that by accepting the label corruption I was buying into and furthering the stigmatizing function that corruption accusations serve in the unequal power dynamics that mark the relationship between the Global North and the Global South. In other words, the characterization of places like Nigeria as corrupt blames internal social practices for problems like underdevelopment, masking the dominant role rich nations, multinational institutions, and the global economic system play in creating and reproducing Nigeria’s problems. In fact, I have much sympathy for this view, but my defense was that I didn’t (and still don’t) think that a global political economic explanation should preclude attention to how things actually unfold in everyday life in places like Nigeria. These global forces have their impact locally and people on the ground have considerable agency. It is impossible to spend time in Nigeria and not feel Nigerians’ agency, including when it comes to corruption.

The second concern was much more problematic from my point of view. In addition to worrying that the branding of places like Nigeria as “corrupt” blamed the victims, some folks seemed to think that the very concept of corruption itself was ethnocentric and misleading. This criticism I found disconcerting and worrisome for anthropology. Indeed, my view was (and is) that all of the best work in anthropology about corruption has been keenly attentive to blurring boundaries, but also distinguishing between practices that might best be understood as the legacy or instantiation of a gift economy, face-to-face kinship and patron-client relations, and so on, and those that are more accurately described as corruption (Haller and Shore 2005; Blundo and Olivier de Sardan 2006; Blundo 2007). My own book was motived by the desire to examine the complex ways that Nigerians both blur the boundaries and make and understand these distinctions. While I would be the first to acknowledge that certain practices Westerners might describe as corruption are experienced as something else by Nigerians, to me it was absurd to imagine that the concept of corruption was inappropriate to describe an important social problem in Nigeria. I have never met any foreigner who was more insistent than ordinary Nigerians are that corruption is a massive problem in their country.

To assert that the concept of corruption is nothing but an ethnocentric misnomer for something else is not only wrong, in my view it also points to problematic tendencies in anthropology when it comes to studying the issue—and perhaps other similar topics as well. Most centrally, assertions that corruption is an ethnocentric label can have, I think, the opposite implications from what those who proffer the critique intend. While an accusation of ethnocentrism is always, at least implicitly, a kind of plea for or defense of some notion of cultural relativism, in reality thinking of corruption in this way risks eliding how historical and global political economic forces present very different societies with similar predicaments. While it is surely true that colonialism in Nigeria played huge role in creating contemporary corruption in the post-colonial state, and while it is also certainly true that discourses of discontent about corruption are stoked by Western-derived ideas about development and democracy, to assert that corruption is an ethnocentric concept is to deny that many dominant practices, beliefs, and discourses in post-colonial Nigeria are authentically Nigerian. Nigerians themselves are deeply preoccupied with corruption. To reduce the concept to some kind of colonial or contemporary Western imposition is to deny Nigerians agency in the making of their history and culture. While I would be the first to agree that corruption is a slippery term often deployed in simplistic and problematic ways, the solution is certainly not to pretend it doesn’t really exist in places like Nigeria. It seems to me that the analogous fallacy would be to suggest that because postcolonial states and many of their problems have their roots in colonialism and are perpetuated by contemporary macro-political global inequalities it is therefore inappropriate to study (much less criticize) how these states function in local, everyday contexts. The fact that Nigerians recognize corruption as a real problem in their society is a testament to the complex ways their country is integrated into a global world; to dismiss it as merely a Western label is tantamount to a negation of that fact.

The second anecdote speaks to anthropologists’ curious allergy to the concept of culture, a discomfort that is at the very least ironic given our role in promoting and popularizing it. The particular unease about analyzing corruption as something cultural points to both the well-founded reasons why anthropologists are wary of our own master concept and to the ways that discarding it entirely is, in my view, the equivalent of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The story begins at an annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association a few years after my book was published. One of my best friends from another university, with whom I had gone to graduate school, told me that a senior scholar whom he liked and very much respected (and whose work I also respected, but whom I did not know personally) had just told him that she had recently read my book and liked it a lot. It sat on her bookshelf for almost two years unopened, she told him, because she so hated the title. Of course I cringed at this account, again remembering my own ambivalence about the title and my (now seemingly well-warranted) fears that it would signal something about the contents to anthropology audiences that I did not intend.

For reasons I have already alluded to above (such as worries about ethnocentrism and blaming the victims), but also because anthropology was only beginning to study the nation-state and state-related topics, up until about 20 years ago it is difficult to find much of anything published in anthropology that labeled itself as being about corruption. To the extent that anthropology dealt with the issue it tended to cast it in relation to gifting, reciprocity, patronage, and so on (Yang 1994; Yan 1996). Addressing corruption per se was left mostly to political science (Nye 1967; Chabal and Daloz 1999; Heidenheimer 2002; Routley 2016). And when anthropologists finally took on the topic of corruption directly, accounts from political science were appropriated or criticized based, at least implicitly, on how they crafted their arguments about culture. On the one hand, from anthropologists’ point of view the worst accounts were those that adopted so-called culturalist arguments, attributing corruption in postcolonial societies to the legacy of tradition or to essentialized notions of culture. On the other hand, in anthropology the most widely cited and respected scholarship from political science that focuses on corruption (in African Studies the best example would be Bayart’s The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (1993), but also Joseph (1987) and Ekeh (1975)) is that which exhibits tremendous knowledge about local context—in short, those that best take into account culture. As anthropologists have begun to take seriously the state as an object of study (Gupta 1995, 2012), it has become impossible not to address corruption. But, even now, few anthropologists seem comfortable with the pairing of culture and corruption.

A few months after the AAA meetings I received an invitation from this same scholar to come and speak at her university, which I did the following year. In addition to giving a public lecture, I also did a guest appearance in one of my host’s undergraduate classes, for which she had assigned my book to her students. During the class I told the story about what my friend had said about my host’s reaction to my book title. I did so not to embarrass her, but to try to reinforce a point I wanted to make about the politics of studying corruption in anthropology. After the class my host and I had a very productive conversation about these issues. As I suspected, her aversion to the title A Culture of Corruption was precisely that it seemed to signal that the contents might include an argument that reduced corruption to some kind of African or Nigerian cultural problem—in short, a culturalist argument. As should be clear by now, I think it is possible—though not easy—to include culture in an account of corruption without resorting to culturalist assumptions.

Corruption and Culture in Nigeria

A few weeks after I’d given copies of my book to several friends in the southeastern Nigerian city of Owerri—a place where many of the events depicted in the book occurred—I had the opportunity to get together with them over beers. After a couple of rounds, I finally mustered the courage to ask if anyone had had the time to read the book and, if so, what they’d thought. The reactions were initially positive, with people saying in Igbo and Pidgin English that what I’d written was true. They also teased me a bit, saying that little did they realize that all those years I’d spent hanging around I was actually gathering all this information for a book. Finally, one of my friends said: “I love the book, but there is just one thing I hate.” I asked what that was and he said, “I don’t like the title. Corruption is not part of our culture.” Like a bad penny, my worst fears about the title were manifesting themselves in Nigeria, as well as in academic anthropology. Nevertheless, I asked him to elaborate. He continued: “In our grandfathers’ time people acted with integrity. People who stole property or acted in ways that violated the community’s laws were severely punished, sometimes even completely ostracized or killed. There was nothing like the corruption we have now. Our culture is not corrupt.” Recognizing that my friend was invoking a notion of culture as tradition, and as a kind of romanticized nostalgia for an imagined past, I asked, “So by culture, you mean Igbo and Nigerian customs and traditions, something that characterized your forefather’s time rather than by the present?” He nodded and said, “Yes, of course.”

I then went on to say that what I meant by culture was something different. I explained that what I meant in the book by culture was the things people do, the ways they think, and the patterns of behavior that are occurring in the present. I did not mean to imply anything about Igbo traditions or what society was like in the distant past. At this my friend laughed and said, “Oh, well if that is what you mean by culture, then in Nigeria today we have a completely corrupt culture.” This was followed by others chiming in about the depths of corruption in contemporary Nigerian society, including a familiar refrain about bad leaders.

The narrative of bad leadership as the explanation for corruption in Nigeria was something I’d observed many times in the press, in scholarship, and in ordinary Nigerians’ everyday discourse. And there is no doubt that Nigeria has had some bad and very corrupt leaders whose conduct contributed significantly to the country’s corruption problems. But in my book I’d argued that average citizens were frequently participants in corruption, often with a sense there was no other way to access state-controlled social resources, and with the effect of protecting or making corruption at higher levels even more intractable. I’d also argued that in addition to blaming bad leadership, ordinary Nigerians were remarkably critical of their own complicity. I wanted to see whether several years later, among these friends who had now read the book, that argument still held up, so I recounted a story I told in the book about a group of men discussing the Jerry Rawlings coup in Ghana where he executed former leaders, ostensibly to rid the country of corruption. That conversation progressed with one man saying that in Nigeria a dozen leaders executed wouldn’t be enough to make a dent in corruption. Someone else said a planeload wouldn’t be enough, drawing a laugh. Another suggested a shipload would not be enough, drawing a bigger laugh. But the biggest laugh—because the men thought it was most true—was when one of them said, essentially, that they would all have to be killed, because anyone who reached such positions of power would act the same way.

As I retold the story, my interlocutors laughed heartily and said, “O wu eziokwu,” Igbo for “it is true.” The conversation continued in that vein, with the men discussing the pressures that people with access to money and power in Nigeria experience to behave corruptly—pressures that come from kin and community, friends and peers, and even from society at large as a man with wealth and power is supposed to be able to accumulate enough to share generously with his clients. The notion that Nigeria—like other places in Africa—has a “moral economy” of corruption was introduced and powerfully argued by the French anthropologist Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (1999). Similarly, Steven Pierce (2016) traces the emergence of a moral economy of corruption to changes that began in the colonial period that set the stage for Nigeria’s current problems. Both Olivier de Sardan and Pierce emphasize the extent to which behaviors that could be (and often are) labeled corruption, even by Nigerians, are commonly undertaken to fulfill obligations to kin, community, and networks of patron-clientism. They also point to the complex intersection of state bureaucracy and face-to-face sociality and its role in creating opportunities, and sometimes even imperatives, for corruption.

Although my interlocutors in Nigeria would probably say that the term “moral economy” is “big grammar,” I think given the chance they would recognize and agree with much of what Pierce and Olivier de Sardan say about a moral economy of corruption. However, while Pierce is surely correct to insist that Nigeria’s current predicament of corruption must be historicized, and that policies and practices of colonial governance provide much of the explanation for the present situation, ordinary Nigerians are much more likely to blame themselves and their current leaders. To a fault, Nigerians are mostly unwilling, or perhaps unequipped, to blame either the colonial past or contemporary geopolitics for corruption. Of course one occasionally hears such arguments, but they tend to be proffered by Nigerian academics or by Nigerians who have lived in the diaspora. Most ordinary Nigerians see the country’s problems as primarily homegrown and locally made. Whether one calls it a “moral economy” or “culture,” Nigerians recognize their own agency in the reproduction of corruption. While this view surely lets the West off the hook more than it deserves to be, perhaps it is not such a bad thing, because it seems likely that the West will continue to operate with its own interests at heart, and only Nigerians will truly have a stake in fixing the country’s problems, corruption or otherwise.

Conclusion

I suspect that anthropologists have begun to study corruption—and call it the study of corruption—because our interlocutors in the places we work have vocally identified it as a real and problematic phenomenon in their societies. Of course the fact that people in Nigeria—or anywhere else—call something in their society corruption should not lead us to presume that it means the same thing or functions in the same way everywhere. Not only are meanings and practices of corruption shaped by cultural context, they are also revealing windows onto other aspects of social life.

I have suggested that anthropology has been timid in studying corruption because the concept smacks of ethnocentrism. Anthropologists have shied away from studying corruption because it has been used as a stigmatizing label to blame other cultures for problems that have wider historical and political economic underpinnings. As reactions to my book suggest, just because we attempt to study corruption ethnographically, in context, does not mean that we easily or automatically overcome the problem that no matter what one says about corruption in a place like Nigeria, simply by talking about corruption at all one risks continuing and contributing to stigma and stereotypes.

If Nigerians have been obsessed with corruption even as anthropologists have been disinclined to study it, Nigerians and anthropologists also differ markedly with regard to using culture as an explanation for corruption. Both examples illustrate the powerful ways that ideas about culture can be mobilized in explanations of corruption. Anthropologists’ discomfort with offering culture as cause of corruption is mostly related to the problems with so-called “culturalist” accounts. Such narratives attribute causality to essentialist or naturalized notions of culture. Culturalist accounts tend to blame the victims: they assume that there is something inherent about Nigeria and Nigerians that makes them corrupt. Such accounts are indeed highly problematic. But by comparing anthropologists’ position on the relationship between culture and corruption to ordinary Nigerians’ views, I have tried to show that discarding culture in explaining corruption is, in its own way, myopic.

In contrast to anthropologists, ordinary Nigerians are quick to attribute corruption to their contemporary culture (with the caveat that “culture” is also sometimes deployed to refer to an idealized past that contrasts romantically with the present). While it is certainly worth worrying whether Nigerians have absorbed globally circulating culturalist accounts and participate in blaming themselves for things that have their causes elsewhere, I think that such a perspective is too facile. Instead, I take seriously Nigerians when they call corruption “the Nigerian factor,” and when they tell stories that reflect their own complicity in reproducing practices they also lament. On the one hand, Nigerians should probably blame corruption on colonialism and their country’s current position in the global political economy more than they do. On the other hand, perhaps their perspective is a healthy one because it seems much more likely that Nigerians will successfully address the scourge of corruption if they focus on what they can do themselves rather than if they wait for the world to redress the wrongs of colonialism or fix the inequities of the contemporary global economy.

If Nigeria has something like a culture of corruption—and I remain as hesitant to use the phrase now as when I consented to the title of my book—then probably only Nigerians can change it for the better, even (or perhaps especially if) we acknowledge that others are implicated in Nigeria’s current troubles. As I often tell my friends in Nigeria, they have good reason to be skeptical about the intentions of those from the outside who try to tell them what to do. And as the repercussions for my friend and friendship in the wake of the doctor’s threatened lawsuit attest, even those of us who would like to believe we have good intentions find it difficult to navigate corruption and the power of its accusations.

I remain unsure how best to think about the doctor’s threatened lawsuit against me. In my most confident moments I simply regret not giving him a pseudonym, thereby saving my Nigerian friend and me the trouble of his wrath. I will always regret the damage I did to that friendship in defending myself. In less secure moments I revert to some my original fears that writing about corruption in a place like Nigeria almost inevitably contributes to the label’s stigmatizing, victim-blaming force, perhaps no matter what one says. And yet it is Nigerians’ insistence that corruption is a real and detrimental problem in their society that convinces me that trying to understand it is an important anthropological project.