I am grateful for Eric Uslaner's thoughtful review of my book. The exchange between us highlights for me, above all, the benefits of reading and conversing across disciplinary boundaries. Uslaner correctly notes that my book refers relatively little to a vast political science literature on corruption. My aim was to understand corruption in Nigeria as it is experienced by ordinary citizens, rather than to contribute to Western analytical debates about (possibly) more universal aspects of corruption and its consequences. But I certainly acknowledge and accept that my own analysis and understanding (as well as the larger contribution of my book) would have benefited from a deeper engagement with the political science literature on corruption. I would quibble with his contrast between anthropologists' “stories” and political scientists' “data.” To me, real people's lives and narratives are among the most powerful data in the social sciences—but that is why I am an anthropologist.

Uslaner notes that I offer little comparative data from other countries, and he wonders what I can say about how Nigeria is different from other places with regard to corruption. Any insights I can offer on this question are mostly speculative because I have not conducted research on corruption anywhere besides Nigeria. Based on what I know from the literature about corruption elsewhere (I am most familiar with work on Africa), many features of corruption in Nigeria are similar and familiar across the continent, and likely more broadly. But a number of dimensions of corruption in Nigeria stand out as at least somewhat distinct. Certainly the scale of Nigeria's petroleum-based economy makes it different from most other cases. In addition, Nigeria's international reputation for corruption, symbolized by the infamous e-mail scams, has positioned it somewhat uniquely as a global icon of corruption in ways that reverberate in Nigerian society more acutely than I have observed in other settings. Further, ordinary Nigerians are extremely and collectively self-critical (arguably, more so than in most other societies) about their own role in perpetuating corruption—hence, my contention that petty and grand corruption are more deeply intertwined than I think Uslaner suggests. Nevertheless, overall I agree with his larger analytical argument that the social reproduction of corruption is tied to the “inequality trap” that he so persuasively explains and demonstrates in Corruption, Inequality, and the Rule of Law.

Finally, I must comment briefly on Uslaner's statement that my basic argument is that “corruption is part of Nigerian culture.” This is certainly true; hence, the title of my book. While Uslaner has not misread my argument, I want to caution any potential readers that my ethnographically based analysis of corruption in Nigeria ultimately counters misguided notions that corruption is rooted in some kind of traditional African past (often romanticized or dismissed as “culture”). Instead, as he observes, I connect corruption to contemporary economic, social, and moral structures and processes that reproduce inequality in Nigeria—a position than makes both of us kindred spirits more than cross-disciplinary antagonists.