Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss two kinds of dilemmas that contemporary urban ethnography, putting into practice the postmodern notion of reflexivity, cannot avoid to face. They specially come out during fieldworks on "bounded places" - areas marked by symbolical barriers, cultural complexity and marginal people - in which, usually, ethnographers run into various "demands of help". Set of problems comes out, on one hand, by the necessity to practise a kind of research not merely descriptive, but also active and change-oriented (clinical dilemma), and, on the other, by the need to adopt an analytical language intelligible to the different actors and useful to face the various demands raised in the course of research (polyphonic dilemma). The two orders of problems are socially constructed and also interconnected and, at last, they raises "new" genre of dilemmas for all kind of fieldwork: clinical, ethical, scientific and "writing culture" dilemmas. The paper stress the relevance and the vitality these dilemmas give to contemporary fieldwork, pointing out some indications to improve the practical and polysemic dimensions of ethnography.