Corrupt, Abusive, and Legal: Italian Breaches of the Democratic Contract

Pardo, Italo

doi:10.1086/695804

Cited by 26 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Together, the predominance of the language of the unruly points to the ongoing anthropological preoccupation with the ways people refuse containment. Similarly, a supplemental issue of Current Anthropology based on a Wenner‐Gren symposium on corruption, examines failures of containment via corruption and its “transgressions” (Muir and Gupta ) of boundaries (Ansell ; Bocarejo ; Feldman ; Hetherington ; Hornberger ; Musaraj ; Nugent ; Osburg ; Pardo ; Schneider ; Sharma ; Shore ; Smart ; D. Smith ; Tidey ). Anthropologists in 2018 asked: What unruly practices do people engage in to respond to the captivity logics that shape their bodies, minds, and movements?…”

Section: Unruly People and Affectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Doughty

2019

American Anthropologist

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This essay reviews articles produced in the four key American Anthropological Association cultural anthropology journals throughout 2018, and identifies the ways cultural anthropologists took up Haraway's invitation to "stay with the trouble" through implicit and explicit engagement with logics of captivity and its failures. This work suggests ongoing attention to long-standing themes in cultural anthropology-tensions between capture and escape, constraint and resistance, structure and agency-even as it suggests that captivity and its unruly failures can productively draw our attention to new ways of thinking about governance, temporality, scale, affect, political economy, posthumanism, ontology, care, and infrastructure. In this review, I ask: What can and cannot be contained in the contemporary moment, and what is at stake in that containment, or in the seepage that exceeds its borders?The review focuses on key ways anthropologists analyzed these long-standing questions anew in 2018: captivity and the nature of the human, dependency and exile, and violence and borders, and, by contrast, runaway change and uncertainty, unruly people and affects, and seeping waste and toxicity. Overall, I suggest that captivity and seepage provide productive provocations for further study. [year in review, sociocultural anthropology, captivity, escape, uncertainty, waste] RESUMEN Este ensayo revisa artículos producidos en las cuatro revistas científicas claves de la Asociación Americana de Antropología a lo largo de 2018, e identifica las formas como los antropólogos culturales aceptaron la invitación de Haraway para "quedarse con el problema" a través de un envolvimiento con las lógicas de la captividad y sus fallas. Este trabajo sugiere atención continua a temas de larga data en antropología cultural -tensiones entre captura y escape, restricción y resistencia, estructura y agencia-aun cuando sugiere que esa captividad y sus fallas ingobernables pueden productivamente llamar nuestra atención a nuevas formas de pensar sobre gobernanza, temporalidad, escala, afecto, economía política, posthumanismo, ontología, cuidado e infraestructura.En esta revisión, pregunto: ¿Qué puede y qué no puede ser contenido en el momento contemporáneo, y qué está en juego en esa contención o en la filtración que supera sus fronteras? La revisión se enfoca en las formas claves en que los antropólogos analizaron estas cuestiones de larga data de nuevo en 2018: captividad y la naturaleza de lo humano, dependencia y exilio, y violencia y fronteras y, por contraste, cambio desenfrenado e incertidumbre, personas rebeldes y afectos, y residuos filtrantes y toxicidad. En general, sugiero que la captividad y la filtración proveen provocaciones productivas para estudio posterior. [año en revisión, antropología sociocultural, captividad, escape, incertidumbre, residuos]

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Section: Unruly People and Affectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Doughty

2019

American Anthropologist

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“…The Cassa was discontinued in 1984. In 1992, all extraordinary intervention ceased with a view to curbing the perverse use of public resources; an aim which has not been achieved-corruption in public life continues in the South as across the country (Pardo 2018).…”

Section: The 'Field' In Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Officially, it is modern (Weber 1978: 956-958;Beetham 1987): authority, spheres of competence, responsibility and career prospects are well defined, technical and hierarchical; personal interest in the office and favouritism are banned; written orders are the rule; and many procedures are digitalized. In fact, formal procedures are labyrinthine and tinkering and 'informal' speeding are endemic, as are the pursuit of private interest in public office, illegitimate political interests and legal and illegal corruption (Pardo 2018).…”

Section: Coping With 'The System'mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The corrupt but not always illegal use that politicians, trade-unionists and public officials across the spectrum make of their offices (Pardo 2018) may feed on people's commitment to personal relations and individual entrepreneurship. However, meeting Rosemary Harris' influential anthropological analysis (1986), the empirical evidence suggests that 'those below', accustomed with but not reconciled to this situation, cannot be said to be powerless subjects.…”

Section: Coping With 'The System'mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Making Second-Class Italians: A Progressive Fabrication and Entrenchment of Inequality

Pardo

2021

Urban Inequalities

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The stereotype of Southerners claims that they are politically and socially backward individualists who lack social sense and cannot be trusted. With specific reference to Naples, I focus on the attendant displacement of citizenship in the conviction that a balanced relationship between citizenship and governance, critical to democratic society, is directly dependent upon the recognised legitimacy of obligations and responsibility on both sides of the spectrum. Ethnographic evidence suggests that policies continue to be implemented that foster ordinary people’s disadvantage and exclusion, giving my informants at the grassroots reason to feel that they continue to be mistreated as second-class citizens. Change, they feel, is overdue. I discuss the nature and ramifications of the kind of change promised by a ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric promoted by élite groups historically adept at riding roughshod over ordinary people’s instances and bent on teaching the ‘populace’ what to think, do, even feel.

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“…A committed ethnographer [5], throughout my professional career, I have worked in the belief that an in-depth understanding of the moral complexity and social value of individual action helps significantly in gaining a better view of key dynamics of legitimacy and legality in the relationship between citizenship and governance. This is particularly significant to a contested analysis of social policy, legislation, integration and access to rights [6,7].…”

Section: The Value Of Ethnographically Based Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal yet Illegitimate Governance in Italy

Pardo

2021

Humans

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For several decades Naples has exemplified the deficit of legitimacy that now outstandingly mars public life in Italy and across many democracies. Drawing on ethnographic evidence from extended anthropological field research, this article examines the increasing gap between rulers and the ruled, which jeopardizes the authority, therefore legitimacy, of governance. With a focus on this major Italian city, the discussion leads to the conclusion that this gap and its ramifications are a substantial threat to democracy that urgently needs to be understood in depth and comprehensively, eschewing both conceptual superimposition and ideological bias organic to vested interests.

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Corrupt, Abusive, and Legal: Italian Breaches of the Democratic Contract

Cited by 26 publications

References 21 publications

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Making Second-Class Italians: A Progressive Fabrication and Entrenchment of Inequality

Legal yet Illegitimate Governance in Italy

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