Corruption and the possibility of life

Abstract

This article analyses how we might understand corruption as anchored in ordinary, everyday practices. Avoiding the double trap of condemnation and relativism, it shows how the urban poor see the aspiration for a purified polity as creating the conditions of possibility in which the political space of action closes down for those within what one might call a corruption complex. Moving between ethnography and literature, the article pays close attention to forms of talk as well as forms of action and demonstrates that the poor display much more nuanced understanding of the state as compared to the way it is represented in the work of public intellectuals and activists.