Imagistic Care
Growing Old in a Precarious World
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Imagistic Care explores ethnographically how images function in our concepts, our writing, our fieldwork, and our lives. With contributions from anthropologists, philosophers and an artist, the volume asks: How can imagistic inquiries help us understand the complex entanglements of self and other, dependence and independency, frailty and charisma, notions of good and bad aging, and norms and practices of care in old age? And how can imagistic inquiries offer grounds for critique?
Cutting between ethnography, phenomenology and art, this volume offers a powerful contribution to understandings of growing old. The images created in words and drawings are used to complicate rather than simplify the world. The contributors advance an understanding of care, and of aging itself, marked by alterity, spectral presences and uncertainty.
Contributors: Rasmus Dyring, Harmandeep Kaur Gill, Lone Grøn, Maria Louw, Cheryl Mattingly, Lotte Meinert, Maria Speyer, Helle S. Wentzer, Susan Reynolds Whyte
Taking us into the vast and wild realms that lie beyond our immediately given everyday existence, this courageous collection offers new and original perspectives on processes of aging. Exploring shadowy worlds of dreams and memories, of ghosts and specters, of pasts that refuse to let people go, the book is a landmark contribution to the emerging field of imagistic scholarship.---Tine M. Gammeltoft, University of Copenhagen
The essays in this book present sensitive, thoughtfully rendered comparative ethnographies of care in late life. These ethnographies span a remarkable geographic and contextual range, from a dementia ward in Denmark, to homes of older African Americans in Los Angeles, to apartments in Kyrgyzstan, to villages in Uganda. Together, they comprise a stunningly varied array of experiences of care in later life ‘in contexts where aging is marked by profound bodily or social precarity.’ With societies around the world growing proportionally older, these careful ethnographically grounded analyses of care in late life are of utmost importance both to anthropology and to society.---Jessica Robbins, Wayne State University
Robert Desjarlais is Professor of Anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of several books, including Subject to Death: Life and Loss in a Buddhist World (University of California Press, 2016); The Blind Man: A Phantasmography (Fordham University Press, 2019); and Traces of Violence: Writings on the Disaster in Paris, France (University of California Press, 2022; coauthored with Khalil Habrih).
Cheryl Mattingly (Edited By)
Cheryl Mattingly is Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Southern California. She is an award-winning author and coeditor of multiple books, journal special issues, and articles on chronic illness, disability, and ethics from phenomenological perspectives. Single-authored books include Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience (Cambridge, 1998); The Paradox of Hope (University of California Press, 2010); and Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life (University of California Press, 2014). Coedited collections include Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life (Berghahn, 2018); “Toward a New Humanism: An Approach from Philosophical Anthropology” (HAU, 2018); and Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing (University of California Press, 2000).
Lone Grøn (Edited By)
Lone Grøn is Professor (WSR) at VIVE—The Danish Center for Social Science Research. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on the lived experience of chronic illness, obesity, kinship, aging, and dementia in Denmark, including several coedited volumes of journal special issues: “Contagious Kinship Connections” (Grøn and Meinert 2020, Ethnos); “Social Contagion and Cultural Epidemics: Phenomenological Perspectives” (Meinert and Grøn 2017, Ethos); and “Moral (and Other) Laboratories” (Grøn and Kuan 2017, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry).
Lisa Stevenson (Foreword By)
Lisa Stevenson is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University and author of Life beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (University of California Press, 2014). Her recent work (e.g., “Looking Away” [Cultural Anthropology 2020]) focuses on what it means to think in images. As an anthropologist she has attempted to trace and describe such imagistic forms of thought in the everyday worlds of people in situations of violence—among the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic and among Colombian refugees in Ecuador.
Foreword
Lisa Stevenson | vii
Introduction: Imagistic Inquiries: Old Age, Intimate Others, and Care
Lone Grøn and Cheryl Mattingly | 1
The Gift: An Imagistic Critical Phenomenology
Cheryl Mattingly | 31
Virtuous Aging in Uncanny Moral Worlds: Being Old and Kyrgyz in the Absence of the Young
Maria Louw | 59
“Yeah . . . Yeah”: Imagistic Signatures and Responsive Events in a Danish Dementia Ward
Lone Grøn | 83
On the Silent Anarchy of Intimacy: Images of Alterity, Openness, and Sociality in Life with Dementia
Rasmus Dyring | 109
Together Apart: Fence Work in Landscapes of Relationality, Old Age, and Care in the Ik Mountains
Lotte Meinert | 137
Imagining Self and Other: Carers, TV, and Touch
Harmandeep Kaur Gill | 163
Virtues and Vexations: Intimate Others Caring for Elders in Eastern Uganda
Susan Reynolds Whyte | 187
The Staircase: The Ethics of “Transcendence and Height” in Welfare Care
Helle Sofie Wentzer | 209
The Drawing Underneath
Maria Speyer | 229
Afterword: These Images Burn
Robert Desjarlais | 251
List of Contributors | 261
Index | 265
