Corruption Now and Then: Managing Threats to the Nation in Twentieth-Century Peru

• Autores: David Nugent
• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. Extra 18, 2018 (Ejemplar dedicado a: The Anthropology of Corruption ), págs. 28-36
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In this paper, I draw on Peruvian government responses circa 1950 to the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, an underground political party, to identify the features of a distinctive, mid-twentieth-century corruption/anti-corruption complex. I also show how this earlier complex differs from its contemporary counterpart. In the neoliberal present, concerns with corruption emerge in a context in which the public domain finds itself at risk from an alarming expansion of private appropriating powers. National governments play a key role in reconfiguring the public/private divide, and thus they are directly implicated in corrupt activities. Around 1950, however, it was just the opposite: the private domain was regarded as being under dire threat from an emergent global public. Furthermore, national governments were at the forefront of efforts to prevent the spread of the corrupt globalizing forces that were said to be gathering at the nation’s borders. To draw out the distinctiveness of the mid-century corruption/anti-corruption complex, I focus on the distinctive shadow worlds imagined into being around 1950 as government officials sought to protect the nation from corruption. I also explore the peculiar state optic that emerged at mid-century, which mediated government efforts to see the shadow worlds that officials regarded as such a profound danger