Lo specchio etnografico. Alcune osservazioni sugli sguardi incrociati in antropologia

This article reflects on the epistemological and methodological implications of positionality in anthropological research through an ethnographic experience conducted in Italian forensic psychiatric institutions (OPG and REMS). Drawing on long-term fieldwork, the author examines the relational dynamics that emerge when the anthropologist becomes simultaneously observer and observed. Starting from a concrete episode in which the researcher was invited to teach medical anthropology to institutional staff, the paper explores the reciprocal processes through which ethnographic actors interpret and position one another within the social field.
The discussion situates these observations within the broader history of anthropological debates on reflexivity and positionality. From early critiques of the colonial entanglements of anthropology to the reflexive and postmodern turns of the late twentieth century, the discipline has increasingly emphasized the need to account for the researcher’s subjectivity and social location. However, the author argues that contemporary discussions often risk becoming self-referential rituals of confession, in which the anthropologist’s reflexivity overshadows the agency and interpretive capacities of interlocutors.
Through ethnographic vignettes and theoretical dialogue with authors such as Bourdieu, Geertz, and de Martino, the article proposes an alternative understanding of positionality as a fundamentally relational process. Field interlocutors actively observe, categorize, and interpret the anthropologist, mobilizing their own practical epistemologies and social dispositions. Ethnographic knowledge thus emerges not from a unilateral gaze but from a reciprocal and dynamic process of mutual positioning.
By conceptualizing ethnography as a “mirror” in which researcher and interlocutors simultaneously observe and construct one another, the paper calls for a reflexivity that acknowledges the dual nature of the ethnographic encounter. Such an approach foregrounds the partiality of anthropological knowledge and highlights the co-produced character of ethnographic understanding within the shifting interplay of social positions, interpretations, and power relations.