Imagistic Care

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 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