The Left Hand of Sarah Muir: Corruption and Crisis in Argentina (10/14/2021)

In our inaugural episode, we talk with Dr. Sarah Muir of the The City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Sarah is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist specializing in Argentina and a long-time advocate for a systematic, anthropological study of corruption. During the podcast, we discuss Sarah’s recent book Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion (2021) that explores how ordinary Argentines talk about and diagnose the problem of corruption in their society, especially amidst the 2001-2002 financial crisis.  We learn that talk of corruption as a language for understanding everyday,  interpersonal transgressions, that  corruption is sometimes seen as morally justified, and that Argentines sometimes link corruption to cherished aspects of national culture. In the final part of the episode, Sarah talks about her upcoming work on women’s financial investment groups in Latin America.

To read:
Sarah Muir (2022) Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion. University of Chicago
Press: Chicago.

Sarah Muir & Akhil Gupta (2018) “Rethinking the Anthropology of Corruption.”
Current Anthropology 59(S18): S4–S15.

Sarah Muir & Tiana Bakić-Hayden (forthcoming) “Illiberal Economies: Critique and Ambivalence in a Money Laundering Scheme,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute