Moral Imagination and Political Change in Brazil
By Aaron Ansell
The Elementary Forms of Corruption is an ethnographic history of rural Brazilians’ shifting moral imagination in the context of their country’s recent corruption scandals and political crises. The book explores how Brazil’s cosmopolitan models of corruption, both left-wing and right-wing varieties, found their way to a small sertanejo (hinterland) municipality in the northeast, where people understood corruption very differently. Reckoning with both the leftist Workers’ Party which sought to liberate sertanejos from patron-client relations, and the New Right populists who sought to stamp out the “communists” threatening the patriarchal family, sertanejo people made recourse to older ideas about corruption to decipher and shape national politics.
Written with respect for the Durkheimian approach to culture, The Elementary Forms of Corruption challenges the discipline’s current aversion to generalizable, analytic categories useful for comparison across cultures or historical periods. It posits a general framework for understanding corruption at its most elementary level: the degradation of a moral gradient through the transgressive rechanneling of meaningful currencies.
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“In this brilliant (and funny) ethnographic ode to Durkheim, anthropologist Aaron Ansell takes us to Brazil’s sertão, where he unpacks forms of patronage and understandings of corruption alive in the political system between 2003 and 2022, shedding light on the secrets of social life that our discipline holds dear. Fantastic insights are revealed about Brazil’s cycle of patronage politics, and, too, their more widespread implications.”
— Donna M. Goldstein, author of Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown
“Elementary Forms of Corruption presents a compelling and in-depth analysis of politics and corruption in the Brazilian sertão. It takes us straight to what anthropology does best: it weaves vivid ethnographic insights with an incisive analysis of larger political transformations, and makes a provocative contribution to social theory. It will be a key resource for anyone interested in politics and corruption in Brazil and beyond.”
— Martijn Koster, author of In Fear of Abandonment: Slum Life, Community Leaders and Politics in Recife, Brazil
“Ansell’s book provides a highly readable and intimate account of the intertwining of politics and sociality in Brazil’s rural Northeast. The transformation of the rural poor from clients to citizens is traced in ethnographic detail and with admirable analytical insight, along the way illuminating intersecting phenomena such as friendship, patronage, corruption, and the changing contours of everyday ethics.”
— Daniel Jordan Smith, author of A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria
“Elementary in their complexity, the multiple meanings of corruption are examined in their rich cultural originality in a small town in Brazil. Ansell distinguishes socially and historically shifting moral compasses that guide reactions to attitudes considered politically transgressive, according to principles that follow one another but also overlap; they oppose and imply one another. These dynamics are mirrored around the world, and affect the moral and political imaginations of any democracy.”
— Ana Claudia Marques, author of Intrigas e questões: Vingança de família e tramas sociais no sertão de Pernambuco
Aaron Ansell is Associate Professor of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech, and author of Zero Hunger: Political Culture and Antipoverty Policy in Northeast Brazil.
© 2025
ISBN: 978-1-914363-16-0
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