Abstract
Earlier studies of patronage/clientelism in Mediterranean settings that had their heyday in the 1960s and 70s described social phenomena that continue to exist today. Over the last twenty years, however, attention to patronage on both academic and demotic levels has been grafted on to prominent discourses of ‘corruption’ and ‘anticorruption’. Anthropological analyses have noted the importance of attending to rhetoric, narratives and representations in ‘corruption talk’, though rarely addressing social scientists’ own discourses within this. In this paper, the author employs a reflexive approach to discuss how the public reception of her book on patronage in Italy (Zinn 2001) followed different and contradictory trajectories, becoming an extension of the fieldwork proper. This experience shed light on a number of themes that have been treated in the recent corruption literature: the essentialisation of ‘corrupt’ and ‘clean’ societies, desire and pleasure, the state/civil society dichotomy, and the ambivalent relationship between corruption and the law.