The debate on the ethics of dementia research has tended to treat individuals with dementia, primary caregivers other family members and local communities as preestablished and distinct categories of research participants. What has been overlooked are the meaningful social relationships that run through these categories and how these relationships affect the ethnographer's positionality during and after fieldwork. In this paper, drawing on two cases of ethnographic research on family dementia care in North Italy, we propose two heuristic devices, “meaningful others” and “gray zones”, which highlight the ambiguous positionality of ethnographers in care relations and local moral worlds. We further show the benefit of incorporating these devices in discussions on the ethics of dementia care research: by rendering problematic any fixed and polarized positionality of the ethnographer, these two devices allow for a voice to be given to the individuals who represent the main research focus while addressing the interdependence and ethically nuanced dimension of caring relations.

关于痴呆症研究伦理的辩论倾向于将痴呆症患者、主要照顾者、其他家庭成员和当地社区视为预先确定的不同类别的研究参与者。被忽视的是贯穿这些类别的有意义的社会关系，以及这些关系如何影响民族志学者在田野调查期间和之后的定位。在本文中，借鉴意大利北部家庭痴呆症护理的两个民族志研究案例，我们提出了两种启发式方法，“有意义的他人”和“灰色地带”，突出了民族志学者在护理关系和当地道德世界中的模糊定位。我们进一步展示了将这些设备纳入痴呆症护理研究伦理讨论的好处：