Nigeria's 419: an Interview with Daniel Jordan Smith (3/18/22)

In the second episode of the podcast series, we interview Dr. Daniel Jordan Smith, Professor of Anthropology at Brown University as well as the Charles C. Tillinghast, Jr. Professor of
International Studies. Dan is the author of a landmark ethnography of corruption, A Culture
of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (2007). We discuss this book as well as his latest Every Household Its Own Government: Improvised Infrastructure, Entrepreneurial Citizens, and the State in Nigeria (2022). Dan explains how Nigerians understand corruption, its place in their national culture, and Nigerians' efforts to fight it.  As Dan makes it clear, the “culture of corruption” in Nigeria is as much a "culture against corruption."

Daniel Jordan Smith (2007) A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular
Discontent in Nigeria. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.
Daniel Jordan Smith (2018) “Corruption and ‘Culture’ in Anthropology and Nigeria."
Current Anthropology 59(S18): S83–S91
Daniel Jordan Smith (2022) Every Household Its Own Government: Improvised
Infrastructure, Entrepreneurial Citizens, and the State in Nigeria. Princeton University
Press: Princeton, NJ.