The trouble with transparency: Reconnecting ethics, integrity, epistemology and power

Tracing the afterlife of our explorative article on marriages of Dutch-speaking women travelling to areas held by jihadist movements in Syria, we analyze the harm the celebration of transparency may do. Through an auto-ethnographic reflection, we address how the demand for transparency was used in a media hype that engendered parliamentary questions and an external reflection audit. To understand the appeal to transparency, we argue for the need to relate anthropological ethics to epistemological concerns, and to link transparency to power. Whereas anthropological research needs some level of trust and confidentiality, the quest for transparency starts from distrust and an impetus to control. Neoliberal forms of public management make universities vulnerable to external pressure, with anthropology as an interpretative discipline that values complexity an easy target. Researchers who are recognizably Muslim are exposed to particular harm as heightened ethno-nationalism and an anti-Islam political climate produce them as a category already ‘under suspicion’.