| Summary/Abstract |
In this article, we bring ethnographic insights from the contemporary moment of social and political transformation in Nepal to bear on troubling established understandings of corruption. We argue that corruption furnishes a productive site from which to interpret the relational space of state practice and to probe the ‘blurred boundaries’ of states, polities and markets in everyday lives. Reading corruption as a ‘diagnostic of power’, moreover, can help reveal intersecting and competing structures of power at work in ongoing processes of state construction and contestation. The argument is developed through an examination of three related and overlapping illustrations of public–private transgression, which we characterise as ‘impossible publics’, ‘consensus collusion’ and ‘patronage democracy’. Taken together, they speak to the diversity of practices commonly glossed as corruption, and their embeddedness in powerful mobilisations of affective communion and intimate relations of mutual obligation. We suggest in conclusion that engaging corruption as a diagnostic of power offers critical insights about the nature of, and possibilities for, distribution, political agency and planning. Overall, we make a case for the importance of disaggregating diverse practices of corruption in specific, socially embedded contexts in order to reveal possibilities for the meaningful redistribution of political power and opportunity.
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