BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter One
interest groups may be perfectly legal modes of conducting politics, even if to most
observers such payments may look like bribes.
What we find, then, is that by forcing actions into an already culturally
determined framework, scholars have defined a pattern of actions that only imperfectly
approximates the phenomenon they wish to study. It should be noted that the same
problem will recur given any attempt to define bribery in apolitical terms: bribery is a
political phenomenon, so we should expect that there are as many definitions of bribery
as there are of polity. Accordingly, bribery qua a pattern of actions defies rigorous
definition.
I propose, instead, a relational approach to bribery in which the social relations,
not the norms, assume a prior role in definition; in this way, we should think of bribery
not as a distinct pattern of actions generated by specific cultural norms, but as a
normative pattern generated by distinct social relations. 4 My approach follows on recent
work by economic sociologists, who have sought to break down the orthodox divide
between ‘economic’ and ‘social’ modes of behavior, traditionally considered to occupy
separate spheres of action and hence to be predicated on different logics of action. 5
4 By ‘relational’ I intend to move past the concept of ‘embeddedness’, as classicists might recognize from
the influential work of Polanyi (1968)—e.g. Finley (1977), von Reden (1995a), Kurke (1999)—and as
underpins the work of recent economic sociologists like Granovetter (1985), Uzzi and Lancaster (2004).
Embeddedness points towards how social relations shape economic activity. Yet these social relations are
largely taken to be a flat structure within which ‘economic’, as distinct from ‘relational’, activity is carried
out. On a relational view, within this structure the only work that occurs—the only meaning that is defined,
contested, and negotiated—is relational work. In this sense, ‘economics’ does not occur within social
relations—it is not simply “embedded” in them. Rather, economics is about social relations and is, in this
sense, constitutive of them. For a helpful overview of the differences and similarities between a relational
approach and Polanyi’s work on embeddedness, see Steiner (2009).
5 People have persistent fears over mixing money and relationships, as if the former are destructive or
corruptive of the latter. Zelizer calls this fear “Hostile Worlds” and discusses it at length in Zelizer
(2005b). In terms of ‘economic’ activity, this dichotomy had until recently amounted to scholars’
polarization of gifts and commodities—that is, inalienable goods exchanged between interdependent actors
and alienable goods exchanged between independent actors, in Gregory’s (1982) influential formulation—
which are, accordingly, exchanged according to different logics: see also Sahlins (1972: 277-314). As
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