The unsayable: gossip, data and ethnography in an Argentinean police context

Abstract

Some time ago, Gluckman stated that a most important part of gaining membership to a group is to learn its scandals: what you can say and what you may not. So, what happens during fieldwork when the anthropologist bumps into a piece of information that is considered gossip but it can also be considered data? When and why we reach the limit of what can be said? This paper addresses an episode that took place during my fieldwork in an Argentinean police school, with the aim of reflecting on the anthropological practice and its production of knowledge, and of undressing the tensions between what the ethnographer knows, what he is let to know and what it finally reaches the ethnographical text.