Marco Garrido
My CSSH paper “One Thousand Years of Corruption: A History of Corruption and Anti-corruption in the Philippines since 1946” (67-3) began with an interest in the corruption-mindedness of Filipinos: the sense that corruption was everywhere and constituted the biggest problem facing the country not just politically but socially. At first blush, this sensibility appeared well grounded in reality. The news reported one corruption scandal breaking after another. In 2023 alone, 26 scandals rose to national prominence. Some of these scandals were small but sensational, like an airport worker caught on camera swallowing USD 300 in cash (she claims it was chocolate), and others so large and sticky that they threatened to engulf the nation in political crisis, like allegations that vote counting in the 2022 presidential election was rigged. Corruption touched everything and everyone. Even anti-corruption crusaders were tainted—a government official who claimed the vote count was rigged was himself found to have been the subject of a corruption probe. Anti-corruption efforts were likewise ubiquitous: the Philippine Senate launched one probe after another (how else were so many scandals uncovered?), the media aired exposés, NGOs published manuals on combating corruption, and local agencies conducted “values-formation” seminars designed, among other things, to teach workers and the poor how not to be corrupt. My favorite artifact of this phenomenon is the Corruptionary, a dictionary of Philippine-specific corruption-related terms consisting of 442 entries listed from A to Z. The cover of the book is remarkable. It features a wraparound illustration of a world overrun by corruption, resembling, in detail and perversity, a Hieronymus Bosch triptych done in the style of Filipino komiks. It portrays people from all walks of life on the take. We see officials receiving bags of money and people queuing to have their papers fixed, some represented as crocodiles, all blissfully corrupt.
After having been immersed in this “mental atmosphere” (Marcel Mauss’ term) for long enough, I began to wonder if corruption-mindedness was simply a reflection of reality—of the objective incidence of corrupt actions—or, rather, a way of perceiving it—a habit of mind rooted in the belief that Philippine society is irremediably corrupt. In this regard, corruption-mindedness is a bit like witchcraft in that its constitutive power fundamentally rests on collective belief. In witchcraft the belief is that witches are real and with corruption-mindedness it’s that Filipinos are corrupt. It’s with this idea in mind that people tend to see corruption in everything—because they’ve learned to look for it.
The argument in my head remained vague, however. It needed something to ground it, to give it shape. I found this something rummaging through the shelves of Popular Bookstore[1] in Timog, Quezon City: a four-volume chronicle by Maria Felisa Syjuco Tan called Highlights of Philippine History. It consisted of succinct descriptions of significant political events in the country, year by year, from the Second World War through the end of Fidel Ramos’ presidential term (1941-1998). Each volume concluded with a section called “Newsbreakers” listing political scandals, international events held in the country (including every beauty pageant, naturally), natural disasters, sensational crimes and notorious individuals, and “unusual phenomena” usually involving apparitions of the Virgin Mary. I used the chronicle to make a table of major corruption scandals in the country from its independence in 1946 through the election of Bongbong Marcos in 2022.
This simple act of organization proved revelatory. On the face of it, the sheer number of scandals attending every administration seemed to support the view that corruption was endemic to the Philippines. Upon closer inspection, however, it became clear that the “corruption” at issue in different times was not the same thing. The scandals revolved around some moral transgression, sure, but the nature of that transgression, and whether or not it actually broke any laws or formal rules, varied considerably across time. For instance, the extravagant wedding of Ferdinand Marcos’ daughter Irene in 1983 (entailing the remodeling of an entire town) caused more of a scandal than the malversation of public funds through the Coconut Levy in 1981. Why? Because, as I argue in the paper, that particular moment in 1983 was ripe for outrage. For me, the particular discovery was that corruption is not one thing, objective and immutable, but “a moving object” and impossible to understand outside of the social and historical context giving it meaning.
Making the table—and through it being able to see both the persistence and variability of corruption over the country’s history—catalyzed a process of conceptual mitosis. The idea of corruption as a moving object became “One Thousand Years” and the idea of corruption-mindedness a separate paper. As I worked out these ideas, it became clear to me that corruption was more than just a moral problem. It was an epistemic one, meaning that it involved, crucially, knowledge of what constituted appropriate conduct. The origins of this knowledge in the historical experience of Western countries had been effaced, however, and a particular way of doing things promulgated as a universal standard. For people on the ground in the Philippines and other late modernizing countries, who found they had to engage in corruption simply in order to get things done, the result was a bad conscience: a sense that one is doing things the wrong way—and the fervent, desperate wish to do them the right way. A bad conscience easily leads to a conception of oneself in negative terms, and thus to self-flagellation. I became interested in the negativity brought about by the discourse of corruption, and beyond corruption by the other “bad words” defining Philippine politics, such as patronage, patrimonialism, and oligarchy. This way of thinking, in the negative, inevitably made Filipinos feel bad about themselves. I became convinced that the path forward required more than reforming “dysfunctional” behaviors as prescribed by developmental accounts. It required epistemic struggle: a revaluation of existing knowledge and the production of new knowledge in light of the local durable realities of social structure, culture, and history.
Before I knew it, a book was emerging, and an impertinent one at that—it had cut in front of the book I was already writing on democracy in the Philippines. That book will get written, I trust, but for now I feel that I must write this one, Bad Words. Anyway, I have learned at this point in my apprenticeship to the Muse not to insist otherwise.
References
Mauss, Marcel. 1972 [1902]. A General Theory of Magic. London: Routledge.
Syjuco Tan, Maria Felisa, ed. 2015a. Highlights of Philippine History, Volume 1: War and Reconstruction, 1941-1947. Quezon City: Pantas Publishing and Printing.
— 2015b. Highlights of Philippine History, Volume 2: Presidencies from Quirino to Macapagal, 1948-1964. Quezon City: Pantas Publishing and Printing.
— 2017. Highlights of Philippine History, Volume 3: The Marcos Years, 1965-1986. Quezon City: Pantas Publishing and Printing.
—2023. Highlights of Philippine History, Volume 4: Presidencies of Corazon C. Aquino (1986-1992) and Fidel V. Ramos (1992-1998). Quezon City: Pantas Publishing and Printing.
[1] It’s called Popular Book Club now, perhaps in order to avoid a lawsuit from Singapore’s Popular Bookstore.
Marco Garrido is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Chicago. His first book, The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila (University of Chicago Press, 2019), received multiple awards, including for best book in political and urban sociology. He is working on a second book, tentatively titled “Bad Words,” about the imbrication of corruption, politics, and knowledge production in postcolonial Philippines.
