Main description:

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 Gron, Maria Louw, Cheryl Mattingly, Lotte Meinert, Maria Speyer, Helle S. Wentzer, Susan Reynolds Whyte

Contents:

Foreword

Lisa Stevenson | vii

Introduction: Imagistic Inquiries: Old Age, Intimate Others, and Care

Lone Gron 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 Gron | 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