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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnography in an Italian town, this paper I argue that dementia is “looked into being” through perceptual labour. I probe ethnographic method as an anamorphic practice that holds together, in tension, multiple and clashing views of dementia without resolving them.

Paper long abstract

Starting from the premise that dementia emerges through the perceptual labour of those who attend to it, listen to it, and craft its stories, this paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a small town in northeast Italy to examine how dementia is “looked into being” through multiple, coexisting perceptual regimes. Focusing on people living with dementia, family caregivers, care professionals, and members of the broader community, I trace how distinct modes of attention and sensory discernment enacted divergent images of senility, ranging from ideals of "bella figura"—dignified, coherent, and socially legible personhood—to more unsettling, uncanny, or fractured forms of presence. These images differed in their degrees of articulation, institutionalization, and local circulation, yet shared a limit: they could travel only so far and be sustained only to a certain degree, within particular relational and material settings.

To hold these partial and often incompatible perspectives together, I develop ethnography itself as an exercise in anamorphism. In an anamorphic rendering, distinct perceptual positions do not yield alternative interpretations of a single object, but actively bring different objects into view—on the same canvas. As a result, the images of dementia traced here do not accumulate into a unified account; rather, they emerge through shifting alignments of bodies, institutions, affects, and expectations. This methodological move enables the analytic co-presence of incompatible yet coexisting dementia realities, while sustaining attention to the conditions under which phenomena come into focus—and, just as importantly, slip out of it.