ABSTRACT
A World Bank review (2006) notices that anthropological studies dealing with corruption cover no more than 2 per cent of the scientific literature. This thin presence has its own motivations, which are often not evident, particularly from the perspective of other disciplines. If the need for ethnographic research on practices and ideas of corruption cannot nowadays be overlooked (Andvig 2001), there are still only a few anthropologists who have systematically engaged with this phenomenon. For one thing, corruption is a social practice, and, especially considering the recent critiques to the efficacy of large-scale, aggregate analyses that neglect the critical observation of ground-level, qualitative data, it seems unexplainable why anthropology should remain aside. Having said this, there are a number of problems which anthropologists confront in the ethnographic study of corruption. In this chapter I will first outline some of the main methodological and epistemic limits and problems related to the undertaking of ethnographic research on political corruption. Second, I will argue that ethnographic research in different world societies has indeed provided important and original insights that are still rather unexplored or poorly applied by other disciplines and policy-makers. In order to provide a summary (that is far from exhaustive) of some of these insights, I will frame them within a number of common research themes in the anthropological literature.
