Imagistic Care
Growing Old in a Precarious World

Cheryl Mattingly (Edited by), Lone Grøn (Edited by), Lisa Stevenson (Foreword by), Robert Desjarlais (Afterword by), Rasmus Dyring (Contributions by), Harmandeep Kaur Gill (Contributions by), Lone Grøn (Contributions by), Maria Louw (Contributions by), Cheryl Mattingly (Contributions by), Lotte Meinert (Contributions by), Maria Speyer (Contributions by), Helle Sofie Wentzer (Contributions by), Susan Reynolds Whyte (Contributions by)

9780823299638

Paperback / softback, published 20 September 2022

272 pages, 16 b/w illustrations
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.411 kg

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

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