Signals misread: Affect, risk, and blind spots in ethnographic fieldwork

This paper reflects on an unexpected encounter during fieldwork in Predappio, Mussolini’s birth and burial place, during the centenary of the March on Rome. Alternating between narrative and analytical reflection, I explore how ethnographic attention becomes organised under conditions of ambiguity and affective intensity. Drawing on distinctions between blanks and blind spots and the concept of epistemic disconcertment, I argue that internalised framings of risk, heightened vigilance, and emotional strain shaped how uncertainty became il/legible in the field, particularly in relation to my local host: these pressures encouraged me to resolve ambiguity through available interpretative frameworks or recognisable forms of threat, narrowing the epistemic openness through which ethnographic knowledge is produced. I suggest that ethnographic openness is therefore a fragile condition: it requires not only remaining open to uncertainty, but also recognising when interpretative coherence has arrived too quickly and tolerating ambiguity long enough for alternative possibilities to become thinkable.