Paper short abstract:

I will analyze my fieldwork experience in Slovenia, where I struggled with my double identity as an Italian-Slovenian researcher. I partly participated in the Slovenian identity I was studying and that influenced my ethnographic experience, during both my stay on the field and the writing period

Paper long abstract:

I will analyze my fieldwork experience in Slovenia, where I struggled with my double identity, being an Italian researcher with a Slovenian mother. I partly participated in the Slovenian identity I was studying and that influenced all my ethnographic experience, during both my stay on the field and the writing period at home.

The dilemmas I had to face did not concern the possibility of doing native ethnography, but that of having a split self, always feeling tension between the two cultures. My biography also caused an unexpected crisis, as my self-perception was sorely distressed.

From an epistemological point of view I had to deal with the absence of a clear self/other distinction, which seems to be crucial to the anthropological paradigm; that was part of the way I tried to imagine and build my scientific reliability.

Finally, from an ethical point of view I often had to cope with the uncomfortable sensation of using part of a knowledge I acquired in my life long before I decided to become an anthropologist, and I thought it was a kind of betrayal.