D. When one thinks of ethnography, the image that most readily surfaces is, in all likelihood, that of the explorer² - probably male, a figure still saturated with colonial legacies, oriented towards elsewhere, animated by the desire for adventure and the promise of sensational discoveries. He is the protagonist of a grand narrative destined to be transmuted into symbolic capital, sediment on that celebrated desk: the canonical site of scientific restitution. With the discipline's reflexive turn, however, we have come to understand at length how thoroughly such a fable has been - and continues to be - deconstructed and renegotiated. And yet the metaphor of the journey persists, resurfacing again and again, even beyond that desk which, though transformed, endures in contemporary practice as a space of rewriting and positioning. It also persists in the conflict between the deconstruction of the field/academy binary, which finds its most entrenched form in the altar of the university's solemn architecture. What trajectories, then, are negotiated along the ethnographic path? Which routes are taken? The methodological choices that orient research - and those that emerge in its concrete unfolding - alter the map of the journey in what is perhaps the most intricate undertaking of the anthropologist: that of narration, of restitution, and above all, the inherently political act of dwelling within a participatory gaze, at times an enamoured one, directed towards encounter.
S. If the ethnographic journey continues to resurface as a metaphor, it becomes necessary to interrogate the historical conditions that made it possible. The idea of culture as a totality of ways of life was itself constituted within a context in which European and North American scholars could observe Others under colonial arrangements that afforded them an unquestionable epistemic and political advantage. Acknowledging this inheritance is not enough: it implies, rather, working against it - calling into question the very categories through which we continue to produce knowledge. Even the reflexive turn, despite unsettling the authority of the anthropologist, left certain critical perspectives relatively at the margins, in particular those of transfeminist thought and racialised subjects. It is within this gap that the relationship between anthropology and transfeminist demands reveals itself as productively uncomfortable. While both disciplines share an attentiveness to difference, they diverge in the way they construct their object of inquiry and in the kind of relationship they establish with it. Feminist scholars have frequently articulated choral practices of knowledge production, in which the self emerges through the recognition of shared relations of power and oppression. Anthropology, by contrast, while constituting its gaze in relation to the other, has more rarely theorised that other as an exposed subject - one situated within relations of force that directly implicate the observer as well (Abu-Lughod, 1991).
Ethnographic work thus ceases to be merely an exercise in interpretation and takes shape as a practice of choice: a positioning that exposes, binds and transforms. But where, then, is this moment of choice located? And how might we think it through without falling back into a linear narrative of the journey?
D. Tornare Enigma takes shape, in this sense, as an interrogative gesture that reopens the crossroads, evoking the notion of encruzilhada elaborated by Lacerda de Moura: the image of the intersection of paths as a space dense with possibility, a site in which the territory of choice comes into being. It is not merely a matter of deciding upon a direction, but of interrogating the process itself: who does one become in the act of choosing? The crossroads thus emerges as an analytical device capable of illuminating processes of historical transformation, of situating social subjects - and situating us alongside them - and of rendering visible the pressure of the past upon the present. Within this perspective, action emerges as one of the most spectacular of energies: a radical transformative potency, an authentic revolutionary impulse (Lacerda de Moura, 2018).
In 2025, we undertook our first significant fieldwork experience: a participatory and collaborative action-research process within the field of medical anthropology, developed with a group of students enrolled in the Master's degree programme in Medicine and Surgery at the University of Bologna, and embedded within the urban fabric of the Sant'Orsola Malpighi University Hospital. Over time, this process progressively assumed the form of what we have chosen to term research-creation (Cristofori et al., 2017), through the transformation of the field co-constructed with the group into a laboratory space of creative and theatrical auto-anthropology - a context in which it became possible, collectively, to weave together knowledges, experiences and disciplinary trajectories, giving rise to a shared process of inquiry. Tornare Enigma is at once the title of our project and that of the zine which runs through these pages: a narrative and reflexive device, as well as the interpretive key to our crossroads.
S. Four of the sessions with the students were devoted to exploring practices of theatrical auto-anthropology. In defining the triad of theatre-medicine-anthropology, the contribution of Victor Turner proves particularly central to interpreting theatre as a form of auto-anthropology - that is, as a device through which a community observes, interrogates and reworks itself. Drawing on his studies of ritual and social drama, Turner identifies in performance a liminal space, a "betwixt and between", in which ordinary structures are temporarily suspended, allowing the emergence of alternative perspectives on roles, conflicts and relations of power (Turner, 2014). Applying this framework to the healthcare context, the theatrical device makes perceptible that structural dimension which Turner would define as "structure", and which in the doctor-patient relationship manifests through the hospital institution, its spaces, its rhythms and its protocols. Through bodily experience, participants are placed in a position to feel - before they can rationally comprehend - the relational and symbolic dynamics that traverse biomedical practice, rendering theatre not merely an expressive instrument but a genuine epistemological method.
D. Our project proposes to interrogate how we pose our questions and the worlds that such questions contribute to revealing. The choice of creative and experimental approaches, hybridised with auto-ethnographic ones, returns us, once again, to the struggle against dichotomies: it translates into a remixing of theory and practice in which we, as anthropologists, are led to experiment with our own tools to create fertile experiential grounds capable of giving account of experience - while they, the participants, are invited to explore a learning of the body through experience, rather than the other way around. Art and anthropology share an urgency: that of never ceasing to be in doubt (Castelli, La Cecla, Taussig, 2022). To choose creative methods is to accept uncertainty and make it a resource (Scavarda, 2023). The relationship between researcher and interlocutor is intrinsically twofold: though they share the same situation and engage with the same subject matter, they are never speaking of quite the same thing (Augé, 1997). Personally, I took charge of designing the four creative auto-anthropology workshops, conceiving a series of reflections and practical exercises that drew from established tools of qualitative ethnographic research - at times deconstructing them - and kneaded these together with visual and artistic experience.
S. About the theatrical practices, during the first session, the students engaged with a site-specific contemporary theatre exercise in which they traversed the hospital blindfolded, guided by another person. This produced a radical shift in perspective: a familiar space, such as the hospital, was experienced from a condition of vulnerability markedly different from that of everyday practice.
In the second workshop, we worked with improvisation exercises inspired by Theatre of the Oppressed, during which participants confronted the possibility of rethinking and redefining how they habitually speak about certain pathologies. To explain multiple sclerosis, for instance, Paolo³ - one of the participants - drew on the metaphor of a rotting apple, rendering something complex comprehensible without recourse to technical terminology, and demonstrating how communication might become more accessible without losing its force.
In the third workshop, we worked on the theme of anatomical dissection, constructing the characters that inhabit the hospital through the techniques of commedia dell'arte. This opened up debate on the roles and hierarchies present in the students' daily lives.
In the fourth and final session, participants reflected on their relationship with their own bodies through compositional practices of dance-theatre. This was perhaps one of the most crucial moments - one in which the very title of our research, Tornare Enigma, emerged with particular force. To return to enigma means to return to the complexity of the embodied body in all its mystery, in precisely the same way that the artist engages with the creative process.
D. Andare alla deriva per ri-trovarsi: la mappa come diario del proprio campo (Drifting to find oneself again: the map as field diary) was the first of the four workshops focused on the shifting forms of ethnographic research methodologies. Movement here is undertaken by assuming the posture of the glaneuse evoked by Agnès Varda⁴: gathering fragments, inhabiting what is discarded, transforming experience into situated knowledge. Within this perspective, the field diary becomes a map - a spatial form of writing that renders visible the passage of bodies and the relational construction of the field. The drift, heir to the flânerie, to Situationist movements and to psychogeographic practices, becomes the method through which the future doctors retrace the spaces of the university hospital and subsequently produce an entirely new collective map.
The second workshop explores the interview as a relational and reflexive device for the production of knowledge. Through reciprocal interviews, participants interrogated dimensions relating to the care relationships that had emerged during the research, before reworking the gathered materials through creative elaboration. The shared experiences then converge into three recipes inspired by the work of Hildegard of Bingen⁵ - compositions in which medical knowledge, care and imagination interweave within a shared symbolic writing.
Portraying and withdrawing: figures of the body for a surrealist auto-ethnography is the third workshop I designed, and draws its inspiration from ethnographic surrealism (Clifford, 1981) as a practice of fragmentation, juxtaposition and relational production of meaning. Through self-portraiture, collage and the game of cadaver exquis, we explored together the body as an unstable, collective, cyborg construction, holding image, language and matter in productive tension.
The workshop that closed the cycle took shape through the methodology of photovoice (Wang, 1998). Taking photography as a critical instrument and drawing on a theoretical framework that interweaves critical pedagogy and medical anthropology, Ricucire i tre corpi adopts the tripartition of the Mindful Body (Lock and Scheper-Hughes, 1987) and, through narrative and collage practices, initiates a process of visual recomposition - rendering perceptible the interdependence of its three dimensions as co-constitutive aspects of a single thinking, relational and political body.
S. The Tornare Enigma project found in the zine a device capable of embodying the crossroads of translating fieldwork into material and relational forms that enter into dialogue with our critical reflections. Far from being a simple act of restitution, the zine takes shape as a practice that further displaces the ethnographic "desk", transforming it into a potentially undisciplined space. It becomes the material device through which research takes form: a partial, fragmented and intentionally incomplete archive that renders what emerges not as a linear narrative but as a constellation of traces, images, notes and discards. Within this perspective, the zine is a semiophore - to draw on the concept evoked by Pomian - a visible object charged with meaning, in which the material support is not a mere container but an integral part of the signification it conveys (Pomian, 2009). The fabrication of our "explosive" departs from conventional academic writing to approach a practice of montage, in which the selection, exclusion and juxtaposition of elements become constitutive parts of the process of knowledge production. In this sense, the zine does not merely document the field but reactivates it, prolonging its tensions and exposing its ambivalences. Precisely because it takes shape as an autonomous form - unbound from the logics of institutional legitimation and from the economies of visibility - the zine inscribes itself within a tradition of cultural productions in which aesthetics is treated as a space of resistance (Watson, 2025). It thus approaches a countercultural practice that wrests ethnographic restitution from the hegemonic forms of dominant culture.
It is precisely this autonomy that consigns the zine to marginal, often underground circuits, where its limited circulation becomes at once constraint and potency. Removed from the nodes of power and from the dominant infrastructures of communication, the zine retains a critical capacity that resides in its resistance to being fully captured or normalised.
D. In this journey, we have chosen the arts as travelling companions and anthropology as a guide. As a master's thesis project - and thus inscribed within the adhesive forms of normative editorial conventions - we found ourselves asking how it might be possible to render an account of a process that had little to do with anything reducible to the writing of two hands alone on a single page. It was, rather, a matter of giving voice to eight bodies that, over the course of a few months, vibrated and dissected their own field, experimenting and creating together within a space that progressively took shape as an unprecedented laboratory. The zine makes of its materiality a manifesto, a support and an epistemological and political foundation: it retains visible bodily and emotional traces, and generates laboratories of subjectivity and community in which body, relation and imperfection become vectors of meaning (Piepmeier, 2009).
Entrusting ourselves to a medium such as the zine, which we constructed by hybridising the materials from the creative auto-anthropology workshops with those from the theatrical practice sessions, responds to the desire to render visible the movement that traversed the research field. More than its results, we sought to give an account of its practices, enclosing within evocative languages the traces and material echo of the project and its participants. What emerges is a we co-constructed in and by the field, one that materially incorporates the shared research project: a hybrid We, embodied in the zine, which takes shape as the "ethnographic dossier⁶" of the experiential narrative. A We that takes form in cyborg bodies (Haraway, 1991) - shape-shifting, with a skin capable of absorbing discards, emotional states and discrepancies between saying and doing as epistemic matter. In resonance with Aveux Non Avenus (1930), the cyborg body of field experience moves through infinite compositions as a political figure of rupture with subjective unity: a plural, non-binary, unstable being that, departing from the margin, destabilises order and opens onto forms of knowledge that are relational, fluid and radically in becoming (True Latimer, 2006). In full awareness of the ambivalence inherent in inserting materials conceived as transitory and anti-institutional within a product such as a degree thesis, these pages make this tension explicit once more - a tension that remains a central knot even as it is set alongside an attempt to reread the contemporary zine, understood both as a research methodology and as pedagogical tools, as well as references to our own social and political positionings. Recognising ourselves in the evocative concept of felt value (Watson - Bennett, 2021), we hold that this perspective integrates profoundly with an object that renders an account of our field experience and our Tornare enigma.
S. One of the devices within the zine that best embodies this perspective is La ricettaria - the recipe book. This is not a simple creative exercise, but a space of translation and tension between lived experience and imagination. Inspired by the form of the medical prescription, la ricettaria reworks and subverts this language, transforming it into a site in which desires and utopias interweave with the concreteness of the everyday. The "recipes", constructed around the ideal figure of the "doctor I would like to (be)", convey relational qualities that proved fundamental for the students in training - qualities that emerged during an initial phase of comparative self-analysis conducted through reciprocal interviews: flexibility, the capacity for listening, the building of consent, a desire for direct experience. These dimensions are set alongside the accounts that surfaced during the theatrical improvisations concerning institutional abuses and the hierarchies present within the hospital environment, foregrounded as concrete tensions in the learning process. These materials, initially laid out neutrally as a Word document, are transformed into pages in construction: layers of text in which multiple perspectives, desires, frustrations and critical reflections intermingle. In an evocative and playful register, the recipes proper are accompanied by stickers and drawings: we find, for instance, the "salad of knowledges", in which a spoonful of experience is mixed with a head of radicchio, or the "baked pasta of the border: a special recipe for ordinary days", in which consent, the deconstruction of power and self-determination are combined with abundant dandelion in the ragù. In these devices, creativity and poetic sensibility interweave with the texture of daily life, rendering visible the difficulties, expectations and contradictions present within the hospital environment.
As one leafs through the pages, their layering - alternating the aseptic quality of a system that ignores the relational needs of care with a deliberately infantile and ludic reimagination - transforms the semiophore-zine into a device that incorporates the most elusive dimensions of experience, no longer reducible to the simple parcellisation of biomedical language.
La ricettaria demonstrates how material and creative pathways can become genuine trails: tangible traces of what emerges from collective experience and from the bodies that traverse the field, layering desires, tensions and alternative possibilities of signification. It is this movement of traversal—this capacity to leave imprints and indicate unforeseen routes—that leads us to reflect on the broader map of our work and on the lines we might trace within it.
D. Following the cartographic metaphor - echoed in several pages of the zine - we propose, then, the imaginary of desire paths: informal trails that emerge from the repeated passage of bodies, from their orientation according to intuitions and tensions that exceed normative urban planning. Through this lens, our gesture is not situated outside the map but traverses and rewrites it from within, leaving traces that bear witness to alternative possibilities of passage and signification. If the "return to enigma" has been for us a methodology, the zine represents our positioning: a situated stance that interweaves the way in which we traversed the field, with the forms we choose for its restitution. It recalls what Nadha Hassen writes in her Research Notes, reflecting on a genuinely community-engaged qualitative research project and using the metaphor of desire lines to describe alternative methodological pathways - trails that emerge from use and traversal rather than from top-down planning. Desire lines thus become epistemic pathways that challenge disciplinary boundaries: traces of what has historically been marginalised, and forms of agency that render visible the practices and desires inscribed in space. They are an invitation to walk alongside communities, to accept non-linear routes and to practise resistance, care and imagination (Hassen, 2026). At the same time, the zine embodies the desire for a conscious embrace of the refusal to be fully legible, and a resistance to the constant demand for utility (Thi Nguyen, 2015) - tensions that are deeply constitutive of this ethnography. The zine positions itself as a gesture that retains and withdraws, that renders visible without exhausting itself.
Desire lines are not, then, shortcuts, but political lines: material and symbolic manifestations of desire that make evident the relations of power inscribed in space, and that reveal the possibility of choice (Smith - Peters, 2018). Above all, they render visible - and traversable with one's own body - the fact that the neoliberal city is not inevitable. For this reason, desire paths represent an imaginary more akin to creative methods and these methodological directions than to being identified as alternative, separate or parallel routes to traditional and formal ones.
We refer here both to reflections on research practices and to the university as a formative institution in its entirety. Though inevitably held, almost magnetically, by the pages and rigid covers of the thesis, the inclusion of a zine as a discontinuous appendix does not constitute a genuinely separate path, nor does it aspire to be one. Such an operation would, in fact, require reiterating the relegation of creative intervention to a merely recreational, marginal or accessory dimension as so often happens - rather than acknowledging its epistemic and political scope. The approach we have constructed positions itself as a necessary and divergent presence within the map, capable of inhabiting it and, at the same time, of unsettling its coordinates.
S. Relegated to the margins, the arts and Medical Humanities are emptied of their methodological potential as anthropological lens and pedagogical practice, reduced to accessory formalities within educational and professional curricula, without any conscious impact on practices of care. In this way, medical training grows rigid, suppresses conflict and vulnerability, and continues to produce - rather than interrogate - the structures of power that inhabit the field in which it is immersed. If artistic creation truly resembles the making of explosives, as Asja Lācis suggests (2021), then the zine has no wish to offer solutions or propose models applicable to ethnography. Like desire lines, it leaves traces, opens pathways, and suggests alternative possibilities within the institutional map. Every page, every cut-out intervention, every sticker or drawing becomes a small crater of experience - a material sign of the tensions, desires and bodies that traverse the field.
The zine, as material manifesto, is our ethnographic positioning: not a neutral object of restitution, but a device that sutures transfeminist and anthropological perspectives, breathing new life into a reflexive turn that too often remains trapped within norms incapable of containing the contradictions of the real. Here, the anthropologist is no longer merely "herself" separated from the Other: she discovers herself in relation, in bodies that touch, in the tensions that traverse the field, in shared decisions and unpredictable encounters. With the zine, knowledge and relation cease to occupy two distinct poles: they become a single, pulsating, living and unpredictable interweaving.
Every layered page is a micro-explosion: it unsettles the apparent order, reveals the possibilities of choice, exposes power and its fractures, and stages a resistance made of care, attentiveness and imagination. It constructs no replicable models, but traces maps of creative co-existence, marking the space of research as a field in which bodies, desires and knowledge meet and transform together. The zine reminds us that traversing the world with attentiveness and courage is not a linear exercise: it is an explosive, radical gesture, in which the anthropologist no longer observes the Other from a distance, but walks inside the world, alongside it, leaving traces that continue to speak even when the bodies have moved on.
Notes
¹ The zine is available at this link: FANZINETORNAREENIGMA.pdf
² Throughout this article, we have adopted gender-inclusive language. Any use of masculine forms is intentional and marked.
³ In order to protect the anonymity of the participants, a pseudonym has been used.
⁴ Reference to Agnès Varda's film Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000).
⁵ Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), German mystic and Benedictine nun, was the first woman to be named a Doctor of the Church. The work of reference for the workshop context was specifically the Liber subtilitatum diversarum naturarum creaturarum (Hildegard of Bingen, 2011, Libro delle creature. Differenze sottili delle nature diverse, ed. by Antonella Campanini, Roma, Carocci).
⁶ We borrow here the expression used by Pettirino in the experimental project of anthropology applied to the care of patients with a migration background at the MISA clinic of the Amedeo di Savoia Hospital in Turin (Pettirino, 2019), itself directly inspired by the MINI semi-structured interview model, designed to elicit illness narratives in health research (Groleau - Young - Kirmayer, 2006).
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