ABSTRACT
Understanding of the reasons for the weak pres ence of anthro po lo gical know ledge on corruption can start from the ethical concerns that are common to ethno graph ers in the course of their fi eld work research exper i ence. There are basic ethical concerns that fi eld work ers raise when dealing with the study of a partic u lar society, stem ming out of issues such as the anonym ity of inform ants, the purpose of the use of fi rst-hand data and the role of the ethnographer as ‘intruder’ in the social reality he is observing (see Atkinson and Hammersley 1983; Clifford and Marcus 1986). One of the main debates that, in the early 1980s, have accompan ied the major anthro po lo gical turn from the func tional and struc tur al ist paradigms towards hermen eut ics and refl ex iv ity has actu ally been about the proper use and useful ness of fi eld work. Setting against the ‘tradi tional’ view of the author ity of the fi eld researcher, who could fi rst attrib ute prac tices and ideas to the people he has been study ing and later analyse
these in mean ing ful manners, the infl u ence from post mod ern ist ideas have played a signifi c ant role in dele git im ising the author ity of the ethno grapher (Faubion and Marcus 2009). Some anthro po lo gists even came to the rather extreme conclu sion that fi eld work is unne cessary to build anthro po lo gical know ledge, putting emphasis on, among others, textual and crit ical analyses, narrat ives and discourses in lieu of prac tices and paths of insti tu tional trans form a tion.
