Dr. Smoki Musaraj
Dr. Smoki Musaraj, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, presents “Corruption, Right On! Hidden Cameras, Cynical Satire, and Banal Intimacies of Anti-corruption” at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Ethnological Society in Palo Alto, California, later this month.
Musaraj’s areas of research include Anthropology of Money and Value, Bubbles and Crashes, Corruption and the Rule of Law, Southeast Europe, and Albania. She teaches courses in Economic Anthropology and Cultures of the Mediterranean.
The American Ethnological Society is the oldest professional anthropological organization in the United States. Founded in 1842 to encourage emerging anthropological research on human cultures. This year’s AES Conference theme, “Exposure,” celebrate formats of exposition—tried or untested—holding out promise to conjure, visualize, and broadcast new reflections on exposure, its histories, processes, discourses, sentiments, and transformational effects.
Abstract:
Since 2002, the satirical investigative television show, Fiks Fare [Right On!/Exactly], airs immediately after prime-time news at a leading national broadcasting network in Albania. Through sting operations and cynical satire, the show tells the raw story of everyday experiences of corruption in Albanian society—from daily interactions with low-level public administration officers to the backroom deals of high-level officials. Over the years, Fiks Fare! has endured as an effective whistleblower in a country notorious for a lack of prosecutions and convictions of corruption charges. In this presentation, I explore the effects of this unlikely anticorruption agent by drawing attention to its narratives of corruption, its technologies of investigation, and its genres of representation. I argue that, through its use of sting operations and mass-mediation, the show constructs specific publics and subjects—victims, intermediaries, witnesses—that engage in everyday corruption. Second, through its use of a genre of cynical satire and vulgar aesthetics, the show constructs a political commentary and critique that makes visible the intimacies of corruption all the while normalizing complicity with figures of power.
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