Imagistic Care explores ethnographically how the 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 authors 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
Foreword |
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vii | |
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Introduction: Imagistic Inquiries: Old Age, Intimate Others, and Care |
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1 | (30) |
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The Gift: An Imagistic Critical: Phenomenology |
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31 | (28) |
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Virtuous Aging in Uncanny Moral: Worlds: Being Old and Kyrgyz in the Absence of the Young |
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59 | (24) |
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"Yeah ... Yeah": Imagistic Signatures and Responsive Events in a Danish: Dementia Ward |
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83 | (26) |
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On the Silent Anarchy of Intimacy: Images of Alterity, Openness, and Sociality in Life with Dementia |
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109 | (28) |
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Together Apart: Fence Work in Landscapes of Relationality, Old Age, and Care in the Ik Mountains |
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137 | (26) |
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Imagining Self and Other: Carers, TV, and Touch |
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163 | (24) |
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Virtues and Vexations: Intimate Others Caring for Elders in Eastern Uganda |
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187 | (22) |
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The Staircase: The Ethics of "Transcendence and Height" in Welfare Care |
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209 | (20) |
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229 | (22) |
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Afterword: These Images Burn |
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251 | (10) |
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List of Contributors |
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261 | (4) |
Index |
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265 | |
Robert Desjarlais (Afterword By) 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 Grųn (Edited By) Lone Grųn is Professor (WSR) at VIVEThe 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" (Grųn and Meinert 2020, Ethnos); "Social Contagion and Cultural Epidemics: Phenomenological Perspectives" (Meinert and Grųn 2017, Ethos); and "Moral (and Other) Laboratories" (Grųn 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 violenceamong the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic and among Colombian refugees in Ecuador.