Raccomandazione: Clientelism and Connections in Italy

By Dorothy Louise Zinn

The issue of patronage-clientelism has long been of interest in the social sciences. Based on long-term ethnographic research in southern Italy, this book examines the concept and practice of raccomandazione: the omnipresent social institution of using connections to get things done. Viewing the practice both from an indigenous perspective – as a morally ambivalent social fact – and considering it in light of the power relations that position southern Italy within the nesting relations of global Norths and Souths, it builds on and extends past scholarship to consider the nature of patronage in a contemporary society and its relationship to corruption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789201987

Dorothy Louise Zinn

Dorothy Louise Zinn is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. Her recent works include Migrants as Metaphor (2018) and The Public Value of Anthropology (edited with E. Tauber, 2015). She has also published annotated translations of two monographs by Italian ethnologist Ernesto de Martino, The Land of Remorse (2005) and Magic: A Theory from the South (2015).

Book preview

Raccomandazione

European Anthropology in Translation

Published in Association with the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (AAA)

General Editor: Nicolette Makovicky, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies

This series introduces English-language versions of significant works on the Anthropology of Europe that were originally published in other languages. These include books produced recently by a new generation of scholars as well as older works that have not previously appeared in English.

Volume 7

Raccomandazione: Clientelism and Connections in Italy

Dorothy Louise Zinn

Volume 6

Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness: An Ethnography of the Degraded in Postsocialist Poland

Tomasz Rakowski

Volume 5

Two Sides of One River: Nationalism and Ethnography in Galicia and Portugal

António Medeiros

Volume 4

The Colours of Empire: Racialized Representations during Portuguese Colonialism

Patrícia Ferraz de Matos

Volume 3

Developing Skill, Developing Vision: Practices of Locality at the Foot of the Alps

Cristina Grasseni

Volume 2

Strangers Either Way: The Lives of Croatian Refugees in Their New Home

Jasna Čapo Žmegač

Volume 1

Disenchantment with Market Economics: East Germans and Western Capitalism

Birgit Müller

Raccomandazione

Clientelism and Connections in Italy

Dorothy Louise Zinn

Translated from the Italian by the author

Published in 2019 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

English-language edition

© 2019 Berghahn Books

Italian-language edition

© 2001 Donzelli Editore

Originally published by Donzelli Editore as

La raccomandazione. Clientelismo vecchio e nuovo

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any informationw storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Names: Zinn, Dorothy Louise, author.

Title: Raccomandazione: Clientelism and Connections in Italy / Dorothy Louise Zinn.

Other titles: Raccomandazione. English

Description: New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. | Series: European Anthropology in Translation; Volume 7 | Translation of: La raccomandazione: clientelismo vecchio e nuovo. Roma: Donzelli, 2001. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018059389 (print) | LCCN 2018059946 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789201987 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789201970 (hardback: alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Patron and client—Italy, Southern. | Patronage, Political—Italy, Southern. | Italy, Southern—Politics and government. Italy, Southern—Social conditions.

Classification: LCC DG442 (ebook) | LCC DG442 .Z5613 2019 (print) | DDC 306.20945/7—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059389

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-197-0 hardback

ISBN 978-1-78920-198-7 ebook

For Odile and Pauline

Italy is a country which is willing to submit itself to the worst governments. It is, as we know, a country ruled by disorder, cynicism, incompetence and confusion. Nevertheless, we are aware of intelligence circulating in the streets like a vivid bloodstream.

This is an intelligence which is clearly useless. It is not used to benefit any institution that might to some extent improve the human condition. All the same, it warms and consoles the heart, even if this is an illusory comfort and perhaps a foolish one.

—Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues

You can say, In Italy, you enter knocking with your feet, because your hands are full. You can sum it all up like this.

—Gilda, Bernaldese friend and raccomandazione artist

Contents

Preface to the English Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction. The Art of Raccomandazione

Chapter 1.   The Ethnographic Setting

Chapter 2.   Patronage/Clientelism: Some Theoretical Considerations

Chapter 3.   Toward a Poetics of Patronage

Chapter 4.   Raccomandazione, Tangente, and Mafia: An Amoral Family of Genres

Chapter 5.   Raccomandazione, Class Relations, and the Southern Question

Chapter 6.   Employing the Little Shove: Raccomandazione and Work

Chapter 7.   We’re Not Uganda, but Almost: Raccomandazione and Southern Italian Identity

Conclusion. Raccomandazione and the Bourgeois-Liberal World Order

Epilogue. What Happened When They Read What I Wrote: Mediterranean Clientelism and Corruption Revisited

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Preface to the English Edition

As its central theme, this work addresses the phenomenon of using connections to get things done, known in Italy as raccomandazione. To issue this volume in English translation is an operation that requires a rethinking of it in time and in space, and as Goodwin and Duranti have written, To rethink something means to recontextualize it, to take it out of earlier frames and place it in a new set of relationships and expectations (Goodwin and Duranti 1992: 32). I therefore open this edition with some information and reflections that should be helpful for an English-language reader a good many years after the publication of the Italian original in 2001. The approach I have adopted by common accord with Berghahn Books has been not to overhaul the text, but instead to respect its initial structure and content, in keeping with the spirit of a book series comprising works of European anthropology in translation. Bearing in mind a new, non-Italian audience, I have subjected the manuscript to some light editing as well as the addition of supplementary notes and a glossary. For an author, the choice of remaining faithful to the original in such circumstances means being able to live with certain anachronisms, resisting the temptation to alter them: just to name a minor one, I mention compulsory military service, which used to constitute an arena for using raccomandazioni among young men and which was abolished in 2005. A much more weighty matter, however, is the treatment of the scholarship that has emerged since the book was first published: to incorporate the abundant literature on relevant issues in an organic way within the text would have entailed a substantial rewriting. Given this dilemma and the decision to forego such a radical transformation of the book, it is perfectly legitimate for the reader to wonder what relevance a millennial ethnography of Southern Italian clientelism might have in the contemporary world. To respond to such a query, I seek in this new introduction to reinscribe the book in new relationships and expectations by providing a brief overview of the pertinent transformations that have taken place from the time of fieldwork to today, not only in the field setting itself but also in the germane scholarship. The other substantial modification with respect to the original edition is the epilogue I have appended that relates the developments subsequent to the publication of the book, a situation of what happens when they read what we write (Brettell 1993). The book drew a surprising amount of attention in the media and in the local community, and I unwittingly became known as a (sometimes recalcitrant) talking head on the subject of raccomandazione. The analysis I provide in the epilogue is not simply a recounting of the events but a reflection that takes seriously the ambivalent, even contradictory character of people’s positions, weaving this back into current thinking about clientelism and corruption.¹

Contextualizing Empirical Continuities and Changes

On 22 February 2017, Italy celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the beginning of Tangentopoli, the juggernaut corruption scandal that led to the fall of the First Republic and overhauled the political scene, paving the way for the ascent of nontraditional parties and forms of antipolitics that have gained large swaths of consensus in present-day Italy. I followed some of the media coverage commemorating that day, where commentators variously called upon by the media reflected on corruption in Italy, then and today. By all accounts, corruption has not gone away, and by many accounts, it has even worsened. In one of the discussions, Antonio Di Pietro, a prosecuting magistrate who was among the most famous protagonists of the Operazione Mani Pulite [Operation Clean Hands] period, stated that what is needed was not only a regime change, but a cultural change. Di Pietro was confirming the need that I had seen, twenty-five years earlier, to place the analysis of corruption in Italy within a much broader cultural context: ways of social being that at that time I identified with the ideology and practice of raccomandazione, a widespread cultural institution in Italy.²

Most anthropological monographs typically see the light of day some years after the fieldwork has been carried out, and this book is no exception. The initial research that provided much of the data took place in 1992–93, the height of Italy’s Tangentopoli scandal, a dating and datum that triggered innumerable insights for me into the relationship between raccomandazione, morality, corruption, and Southern Italian identity. Having settled into the community on a permanent basis through marriage, my ethnographic experience and knowledge of the area subsequently benefitted from a gradual, continuous accretion. Though already somewhat distant from that crucial inaugural moment of research, the first edition of the book wove in some updated depictions and data. The fundamental issues and situations described remained the same, but some important transformations were already beginning to be felt at the dawn of the new millennium: the fall of the First Republic ushered in by Tangentopoli coincided with the unfolding of a gradual process of neoliberal restructuring in Italy that has led to a decline in welfare provisions and numerous guarantees and benefits for citizens (Molé 2010; Muehlebach 2012). As I describe in chapter 6, the unemployed youths with whom I had long been working were now the new addressees of discourses of entrepreneurship and the objects of a new crafting of active subjectivity. They were supposed to forge this subjectivity through attendance of all kinds of newly offered training programs thanks to the generosity of European funds, and a new cottage industry of training companies and European projectification took root in the area. The spoils of political control, epitomized by the Christian Democrat hegemony meeting its demise in 1992, were becoming much more limited than in the past: these resources, especially public jobs and discretionary control of the pension system, were precisely many of the arenas in which connections through raccomandazione described in this book operated. Members of the younger generations were visibly more ambivalent about using raccomandazioni than their parents, having by then absorbed an ethos of meritocracy alongside that of connections. I was already witnessing other changes in everyday life: for instance, the lines at the bank or post office—notorious in the past for Hobbesian scenes of the masses of townsmen elbowing each other out of the way as they jockeyed their way to the counter, but simultaneously also the site of privileged people bearing the queue-jumping raccomandazioni I describe here—began to be regulated with numerical turn-taking systems. And if someone did still attempt to cut in line, now someone else would loudly complain about it. Indeed, one of the changes I began to notice at the turn of the millennium was the fact that people were much more willing and assertive to publically denounce injustices they claimed to have experienced as a result of other people’s clientelistic machinations or bald uses of clout, and in spheres where the stakes were higher than simply waiting in a queue, they would even file formal complaints or denunciations. Dovetailing with this development, the fall of the First Republic regime dragged traditional party politics aground, and it opened the way to various strains of antipolitics that have been received locally, promulgating a conspiracy-theory outlook that sees clientelistic maneuvers lurking around most corners.

From today’s vantage nearly a full two decades on, this reconfiguration of Italian society and its effects are even clearer. The agrotown setting of Bernalda in the heart of Southern Italy has definitively set aside its brush with industrialization that was already ending at the beginning of the research, and which occasioned the deployment of innumerable raccomandazioni for jobs. Agriculture in this California of Italy remains important, and it has even seen a degree of revitalization in quality niches and in the promotion of local gastronomic specialties; seaside tourism, too, still engages many townsmen in summer work, despite a significant erosion of the coastline. Bernalda has gained new renown through its most famous descendant, film director Francis Ford Coppola, whose grandfather immigrated to America. After several visits to the town through the years, Coppola purchased and renovated one of the patrician homes on the main street in the early 2000s, converting it into a luxury hotel that opened in 2011. Even more than from Coppola’s efforts alone, however, tourism in Bernalda has expanded through the locals’ perspicacious capacity to capitalize on the rise in popularity of the nearby Apulia region and the provincial capital of Matera, the latter designated a European Capital of Culture 2019.

Despite Bernalda’s reputation as an enjoyable place to be, there, as throughout much of the South, the persistent socioeconomic gap with the Center-North of Italy continues to weigh on the population, and the historic Southern Question has only been transmuted, never resolved. Levels of unemployment—and youth unemployment in particular—remain among the highest in Europe; the resumption of emigration I began to record in the mid-1990s has over the last decade burgeoned into a hemorrhage on the national level, and this has had particularly devastating effects in the Mezzogiorno (as the South is known). Not long after the book’s publication, the regions of the South reared a collective head in 2003 in a concerted revolt against a decree by the Berlusconi government that would have created a nuclear waste dump very near Bernalda, in the coastal town of Scanzano Jonico.³ As I have observed in my accounts of the revolt (Zinn 2007, 2011, 2017), this was an important signal from the new Italian South, one that disavowed some of the negative stereotypes of the area and inverted many disparaged elements of Southern culture into a matter of pride. But as the Italian saying goes, however, One swallow does not make a spring, and despite the glorious and ultimately successful moment of the revolt, Southern Italy has remained in a subaltern condition with respect to Norths of Italy, Europe, and America.

As I outline in the book, this perduring subordination has its counterpart in a long history of producing knowledge about Southern Italy that has represented it as an unmodern Other. Within this history, studies of patronage-clientelism in the Mediterranean have played a prominent role (Ben-Yehoyada 2014), and they have facilitated dominant discourses outside of the academy that would attribute the persistence of the Southern Question to this purportedly flawed, corrupted modernity rather than to historical and contemporary transnational structural processes impinging here, as in other Souths. To explore the emic concept of raccomandazione as I do here, disembedding it from the processes of orientalism and ethno-orientalism in which it is imbricated, is an undertaking that conveys the analysis in an antihegemonic direction, one that reflects back on what we mean by a Weltanschauung of Euro-American modernity that has at its center concepts like rationality, the meritocratic individual, and universalism. Such an analytical pursuit is what the Comaroffs have cited as the "Verfremdung-effect (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012: 19), or as Italian ethnologist Ernesto de Martino exhorted in a similar vein decades earlier, a stance of critical ethnocentrism" (de Martino 1977; Saunders 1994). To emphasize this point, I would now like to connect my treatment of raccomandazione to related forms in other cultural contexts, a task that in the Italian edition was mostly circumscribed to the Mediterranean region, long the epicenter of patronage-clientelism studies. I will then expand my purview to some of the influential developments in the study of clientelism and corruption that are wholly in line with this manner of theorizing from the South (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012).

Raccomandazione in a Cross-Cultural Context

In chapter 2, in order to situate my approach, I retrace the tradition of studies on clientelism, primarily within the history of Mediterraneanist anthropology and the anthropology of Latin American peasant societies. Much of the scholarship on clientelism has fallen within single-area studies, and it continues to do so, but the new post-1989 world order has concomitantly seen greater opportunities for a comparative attention to how people have used connections in vastly different settings. The fall of the Berlin Wall not only coincided with the decline of Christian Democrat hegemony in Italy, bastion against what was once the largest Communist party in the West, the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiana), but of course it also ushered in a new era in the former Socialist countries. Phenomena that present affinities to raccomandazione in many such settings include Russian blat, which is among the most prominent in the literature. Among her numerous works on the topic, Alena Ledeneva traces the history of blat to the Soviet era, in a society marked by regime rigidity and a chronic climate of shortage resulting from the centralized, planned economy (Ledeneva 1998, 2009). Within this setting, an informal economy of favors flourished as a coping strategy to obtain goods and services, to circumvent or even hoodwink the system. As I document here with raccomandazione in postwar Italy, blat, too, has undergone mutations alongside broader socioeconomic and political developments: in Ledeneva’s post-Communist findings, blat remains widespread, but its status in the new market economy has become trivial and banal in some respects, while at the same time it is more deeply entangled in moral ambiguities related to corruption (Ledeneva 2009; Rivkin-Fish 2005). The picture Ledeneva draws reflects some similarities to the evolution of traditional patronage relations in Southern Italy into a banalization or democratization of raccomandazione that I discuss in chapter 6 and elsewhere, and people’s subsequent insistence that what really matters nowadays is the money —that is, bribery and corruption. Since her early research on blat, Ledeneva has turned her attention to the informal networks and patterns of governance in the upper echelons of Russian society, what people term sistema (Ledeneva 2009), effectively tracing cronyist mechanisms that have remained relatively understudied to date.

Another cultural category that has seen extensive study since the early 1990s is Chinese guanxi: much like blat, it is in many respects a cognate of raccomandazione. While China remains officially Communist, amid the economic reforms that have accompanied post-Mao society, the use of connections epitomized in the concept and practice of guanxi has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention (Yang 1994, Yang 2002, Yan 1996, Smart and Hsu 2007). Indeed, Yang has recently described the proliferation of guanxi studies as a veritable cottage industry in China Studies (Yang 2018: 75). Guanxi (literally, relationship or connection) refers to the multistranded bonds created through mutual assistance and gift-giving over time; it characterizes a network of social connections actively cultivated through gift-giving (Yan 1996). Yan finds guanxi to be a Maussian total social phenomenon, present in both ritualized moments and in everyday life, and in this work I similarly evince how raccomandazione also fits such a characterization. Yang (1994) traces the history of guanxi to a combination of Chinese cultural norms regarding reciprocity and gift-giving, together with the needs arising from the Socialist-controlled economy, much as Ledeneva sees for Russia. In her analysis, the skilled use of guanxi also relates to personal attributes of cunning, much in the same way that we find with raccomandazione (chapter 4). Moreover, like blat and raccomandazione, guanxi exists in ambivalent moral evaluations, ambiguously combining rational, instrumental, moral, and affective relations (Yan 1996); where instrumental aspects predominate, people may judge guanxi to be corruption. Like other guanxi scholars, Osburg (2018) has observed that in the Chinese business world, guanxi has permitted the rise of many entrepreneurs within the post-Maoist economic framework since the 1990s. Yet in the last few years, he argues, it would appear that its effectiveness has declined in the midst of both anticorruption campaigns and the social reproduction of the new Chinese elite, among whom beijing (close relatives and friends) enjoy implicit benefits of connection, much in the same way as my own interlocutors recognized class privilege as a tacit form of raccomandazione (chapters 5 and 6).

What both Osburg and I are indicating is the role of social capital as an underexplored factor. With regard to this point, it is from the related area of corruption studies, which is contiguous and often overlapping with the newer studies of clientelism, that the question of social capital is receiving the most treatment. As Smart (2008) has demonstrated, scholars contrast social capital positively against the negativity of corruption, yet they do not heed the ways in which the two categories overlap. He writes more recently that networks, trust, obligation and a reliance on informal arrangements are all part of both corruption and social capital (Smart 2018: S39). Wedel echoes his observation, noting how social capital is often hailed as the antidote to corruption, but forms of social capital themselves are ingrained in mechanisms that can feed corruption (Wedel 2012: 471). The dichotomy of good social capital and bad corruption gets reiterated in much the same way in raccomandazione, where subaltern categories of people disproportionately bear its negative connotations while others benefit from social capital by virtue of their dominant positions (chapters 5 and 7). What Hetherington (2018) states of his field site in Paraguay is true of many other settings—that anticorruption rhetoric reinforces class marginalization by stigmatizing the lower classes: The practices of the lower- and street-level bureaucrats become labeled as corrupt, whereas those of the professional classes are considered forms of social capital. Analogously, within a moral economy of merit and Weberian rationality, the use of raccomandazione is denigrated precisely by those who have implicit connections: that is, those who are able to convert their economic capital into social capital and vice versa (Smart 2008). As I emphasize in this book, categories like cronyism that make extensive use of social capital but manage to fly under the radar must become objects of explicit attention.

The mechanism of creating status distinctions in this manner, however, does not only take place on the level of the discrete local society. What I have attempted to do in this book is to shed light on how a parallel othering occurs on a global scale, where Southern Italy and other Souths are pilloried for the cultural recognition they give to such phenomena. The issue of recognition is crucial, because the Northern European and North American societies constantly invoked by the townsmen in my study have been all but immune to raccomandazione-type ways of going about things, even if it has not been adequately recognized within those societies or in the scholarship. This point certainly merits being teased out to a greater extent than I did in the original Italian edition of this book. The French have their piston; the United States and United Kingdom have string pulling, back scratching, and clout; the Germans have their Vitamin B (B as in Beziehungen, or relationships; see Kubbe 2018). As a valuable resource for documentation on related phenomena and further cross-cultural comparison, the reader may want to consult the monumental Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, edited by blat scholar Alena Ledeneva (2018), which assembles together many such concepts and practices under the rubric of informal practices. This compendium is by no means simply a curiosity cabinet of phenomena, many of which are similar to raccomandazione, but it instead expands the investigation of informality in a number of directions. It embodies not only an intensive comparative spirit but also the ambitious quest to define some overarching patterns. It is in returning to post-Socialist contexts, however, that we find situations that lay bare the fault lines of the West and the rest distinction, in many ways complementing the path that I have forged in my analysis of raccomandazione.

The New Clientelism Studies:

Dislodging North Atlantic Ethnocentrism

Like the Southern Italy examined here, Eastern European societies have been peripheral to the Northwest European and American hegemony, often viewed in a stigmatizing and orientalist light.⁴ Within such views, corruption and clientelism are widespread, and they are somehow a result of imperfect and incomplete transitions to market, capitalist societies. The remedy proposed, consequently, would be even greater restructuring along the lines of neoliberal prescriptions. What the research in the new clientelism studies has revealed, on the contrary, is that precisely the uncertainties, ambiguities, and gray areas induced by the collapse of socialism have in fact created unprecedented terrain for a reinterpretation and reapplication of previously existing raccomandazione-type phenomena, in some cases offering them a more fertile humus in which to operate. Wedel’s (1998) research in Poland has, for example, demonstrated how a form of dirty togetherness of informal groups that was prevalent under the Communist regime were given a new lease on life in the post-Socialist era, when these groups slid strategically into gray areas created by new interstices of a privatizing economy. Similarly, Čarna Brković, who analyzes raccomandazione-like veze and štele relations in Bosnia-Herzegovina demonstrates how, far from being a residual form of transitional states, clientelism and flexible neoliberal forms of government are mutually constitutive (Brković 2017).

The scholarship by Wedel and Brković eloquently dispels ethnocentric blame-the-victim notions that essentialize corruption in these societies even as they underplay or ignore the subtle ways in which the Euro-American countries themselves feature cronyism, corruption, and other less-than-pristine means of getting things done. Moreover, such ethnocentric conceptions gloss over how global capitalism and transnational neoliberal processes may actually contribute to this state of affairs (Schneider and Schneider 2004; Shore 2016, 2018). Indeed, it was not only in the ex-Socialist countries that rampant, unregulated privatization created favorable conditions for corruption to flourish (Wedel 2012: 465). Wedel’s earlier work on Poland generated insights that subsequently permitted her to problematize the transparency and democratic accountability of neocon actors and shadow lobbyists in the U.S. context (Wedel 2009, 2011). Her concepts of flexians and flex nets are particularly apt as descriptors for the actors in this panorama, people and groups capable of marshaling ambiguity to serve their own interests while simultaneously dissembling their actions by donning various hats: even as they occupy official roles, they are acting as pundits, members of think tanks, consultants to private companies. Alongside analyses such as Wedel’s, a vast literature in anthropology has developed over the critical analysis of the anticorruption industry and its selective finger-wagging (Muir and Gupta 2018). I deal with some of these issues in the epilogue to the book, which relates the field of corruption/anticorruption to my work on raccomandazione.

The reprisal of clientelism research is not only coming from Eastern Europe, however. Tina Hilgers’s work in Mexico (Hilgers 2008) is an example of research in Latin America. Although she uses ethnographic research methods, her epistemological framework, however, still insists on the etic dimension. In her theoretical treatments of the subject, Hilgers (2011, 2012) clearly espouses a position that favors a strong etic definition of clientelism, recapitulating many of the traits in the classic definitions of clientelism from the 1970s that I treat in chapter 2: In addition to being an exchange in which individuals maximize their interests, clientlism involves longevity, diffuseness, face-to-face contact and inequality. That is, a lasting personal relationship between individuals of unequal sociopolitical status (Hilgers 2011: 568). I suggest that the emic perspective emphasized in my study of raccomandazione, as well as in the newer anthropological studies of clientelism I cite here, has moved beyond such an approach, due to a number of reasons that I will elaborate on in this volume. In this preface, I limit myself to citing the risks of repeating the sort of North Atlantic ethnocentrism we have seen in the literature, as when Hilgers cites the work of Sandbrook (1985) on personalism in Africa:

Sandbrook describes personal rule as turning on a strongman (usually the president) who is the center of the state’s political life, surrounds himself with loyal followers who may be hired and fired at will, forces respect of his persona and image, and creates a system of administrative and economic corruption that can only result in economic decline. (Hilgers 2011: 582)

One scarcely needs prodding to apply Sandbrook’s description to the contemporary United States and thereby reconsider the actual degree of difference among nations. The newer anthropological literature instead moves deeply into an emic perspective, often featuring fine-grained ethnographic documentation and analysis. This has led to a substantial reevaluation of forms of sociality with a purpose (Brković 2017) in numerous contexts, a rethinking that, like my own work here on raccomandazione, explores their interconnections with what we have traditionally termed in an etic fashion clientelism and corruption. This body of work also delves more profoundly into questions of personhood in the societies studied, leading to important findings regarding how affectivity is intertwined in relationships that might seem primarily instrumental, confounding the boundaries that etic definitions would place on the categories. Such elements of affect suffuse not only the relations between actors but also those of citizens and their state. In their introduction to a recent Current Anthropology supplement on corruption, Muir and Gupta (2018) highlight affect among the key domains within the anthropological study of corruption, and their remarks wholly apply to clientelism as well. They write,

Affect plays a central role in statecraft, especially in producing practical commitments to state sovereignty and an experiential sense of conviviality among state subjects. [. . .] In negotiating the issue of corruption in both practical and evaluative terms, people cultivate affectively laden relations to one another and to the state, producing along the way new modes of citizenship and national belonging and new horizons for collective action.

Indeed, the new clientelism studies also prod us to place the results in relation to more fundamental questions of citizenship, democracy, and people’s relationship to the state. What emerges are views that are counterintuitive within the dominant paradigm condemning clientelism and corruption on the basis of taken-for-granted liberal presupposition of democracy and the nature of citizenship. Tidey (2018), for example, emphasizes the importance of a morality of political care among people in the Indonesian province she studied, even as this may be appear perilously close to corruption. She writes that poor urban voters view political progress in relational terms as a form of care, founded in politicians’ recognition of them as political subjects. To them, corruption signals a transgression of political care, stemming from an unwillingness to see the ‘small people’ (Tidey 2018). In Bosnia-Herzogovina, Vetters has documented the coexistence of clientelistic and civic relational modes that provide alternative means for citizens to be seen by the state (Vetters 2017). Here and in other recent studies, clientelism is not only a matter of instrumental gain but also of inclusion in a wider political community (ibid: 29). Ansell (2015) traces how progressive activists’ critique of clientelism in Brazil’s Piauí state, launched from within a liberal paradigm, stigmatizes the rural underclass associated with it. At the same time, the abandonment of the use of clientelist electoral propaganda photo-stickers among cultivators sheds light on their alternative democratic imagination, as Ansell puts it, with respect to the liberal-progressive one offered by the leftist activists. Through a dense linguistic analysis, he proposes that cultivators’ heteroglossic practices revolving around the question of clientelism reveal a different sort of agency from that imagined by autonomy that is a premise of liberal political thought. Ansell has followed up this work in an article on voting that problematizes a liberal critique of clientelism that takes as its basis the atomistic conception of personhood as a free-moving particle (Ansell 2018). The emic definition of corruption, in this case, refers to a vote that carries little obligation to affirm the voter’s personhood (ibid.: S135), and his analysis opens a way to alternative critiques of clientelism. In the Bolivian context, Shakow (2011) suggests that, through the hybrid forms it assumes, clientelism can actually offer a language for radical democracy. Anticlientelist calls for purity do not attend to the hybrid ways in which Bolivia’s Sacobans blended ideals and practices of clientelist reciprocity established by the Bolivian state in the 1950s with ideals of liberalism and left-leaning indigenism (ibid.: 316). Finally, like these recent works on clientelism, Anjaria’s study of ordinary corruption between Indian hawkers and the police (Anjaria 2011) offers an ethnographically informed view that questions the assumption of corruption’s antidemocratic quality. Anjaria examines how hawkers manage to impose their claims to urban space, as articulated through small-scale corruption engaging the state in informal practices. The performance of such practices, he asserts, has led to an extralegal recognition of the hawkers, opening thinking of the state to different conceptions of citizenship and democratic participation.

In their overview of contemporary literature on corruption, Muir and Gupta (2018) have highlighted three axes of inequality that deserve analytic attention: class/socioeconomic inequality; inequalities tied to race, ethnicity, and nationality; and gender. Looking at raccomandazione in the chapters that follow, I have wrought an analysis that moves along all three of these axes. On the local level, raccomandazione plays a role in social hierarchies and hegemonic class relations, helping to reproduce forms of social stratification. It continues to mark inequalities on wider levels, from the imbalances marking North/South relations in Italy to those of the international arena. Very much in line with the current research, I problematize the acritical assumption of the hegemonic Northern perspective as a vantage from which to judge Others, not to mention the recognition that Northern practices themselves are not exempt from such evaluations. The question of gender is not solely a matter of who participates in patronage or corrupt practices, as Muir and Gupta note, but it requires us to attend to how these genres of practice fit into gendered cultural schema. This is exactly the view I present in the concluding chapter of this book, where I recuperate the category of gender in clientelism, and in subsequent publications