ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the methodological challenges and ethical dilemmas involved in an anthropological study of phenomena such as corruption that are at the same time hidden and diffuse, concealed and openly discussed, justified and stigmatized in daily conversations. It starts with a discussion of the properties of the object of corruption and suggests that they determine, at least partially, the forms of its observation and its description. The chapter discusses the nature of descriptive sources produced during an empirical research on the phenomenon of corruption by outlining the objective constraints and the strategies that can be envisaged in the field. It presents some recent examples of ethnographic description of the phenomenon in publications and highlights the principal descriptive registers at work. The chapter shows how each of these procedures allows us to "see" corruption in a different way and helps us to understand social and political issues such as local representations of citizenship and the state and its bureaucracies.
