The social life of corruption in Latin America

ABSTRACT

This essay serves as the introduction to the special issue titled, ‘The social life of corruption in Latin America’. The six authors featured in this special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique exhibit a range of scholarship around questions of corruption and anti-corruption in the region. All have been involved in long-term ethnographically based research projects in particular locations in Latin America, including Brazil (three contributions), Peru (one contribution), Colombia (one contribution) and Ecuador (one contribution). In this special issue, these engaged regional scholars turn their attention to the theme of corruption in ‘parts known’, that is, within sites where they have already established deep connections.

Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank the contributors to the special issue and, in particular, Christopher Charles Barnes, editorial assistant extraordinaire, for his patience and editorial skills.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Donna M. Goldstein is a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (University of California Press, 2003 [2013]), winner of the 2005 Margaret Mead award. She writes within the fields of medical anthropology, anthropology of the environment, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) and is currently working on a project that examines the history of Cold War science and nuclear energy in Brazil.

K. Drybread is a cultural anthropologist based at the University of Colorado Bolder. She has written on prison rapes and murders, political corruption, and the meanings of mundane mass graves. Her current project examines relationships between citizenship and violence in Brazil.

ORCID

Donna M. Goldstein http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5771-3752

K. Drybread http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6573-4898

Notes

1 The Panama Papers were a leak of documents in 2015 from an anonymous source at the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. These documents contain personal information on prominent wealthy individuals who used the services of the firm to commit fraud, tax evasion, and international sanctions. Not all of the transactions were illegal, however (Wikipedia).