ABSTRACT
Scholars and academics may like it or not but corruption have become one of the most studied notions in the social scientific disciplines. This trend is well-rooted in Western intellectual debates over the relationship between the state and society, the state and the market, formal and informal, legal and illegal, black and white practices. One of the most striking features of the corruption boom in the social science is the absence of anthropology. This chapter provides a critical review of a large part of this literature, an effort so far neglected. It detects a number of themes which are the most recurrent in the anthropology of corruption and which are relevant to this volume. These themes will be dealt with attention to the detailed contributions that ethnographic studies have provided to the debate on corruption. The discursive power of corruption is one of the most recent findings of anthropology in the field.
