Paper short abstract:

This essay provides a new platform from where I attempt to extend the recent anthropological discussion of affect in relation to the capacity of memory, cognition and language by reconsidering affective enmeshment.

Paper long abstract:

Should ethics come before research, care practice and ontology? If your mother asked staff to call her daughter at twenty past five on an early autumn morning, what 'should' you do as researchers? Is it possible to conduct ethnographic research in everyday life where there are always contingent and unexpected ordinary encounters taking place between research participants and non-participants without interrupting their daily life and violating ethical commitments? Is there an alternative way that we as anthropologists can make the doings, actions and utterances of people living with dementia heard and acknowledged without impetuously interpreting and translating them as abnormal and pathological? In this article, I suggest a creative, ethical and mutually beneficial way of doing ethnographic research with people living with dementia in an institutional setting by turning these ethical, epistemological, methodological matters into a cartographic ethnography with particular attention to affective dynamics of bodily practices. Critically developing Deleuze, Guattari and Deligny's cartographic approach, I demonstrate affectively underpinned encounters and relationality in the condition of co-dwelling. The affective cartographic ethnography allow us to approach and understand not only how the individual remaining capacity can have affects, but also such affectively embedded and embodied practices are actively involved in everyday life beyond the presence of knowledge and memory. Accordingly, this provides a new platform from where I attempt to extend the recent anthropological discussion of affect in relation to the capacity of memory, cognition and language by reconsidering affective enmeshment.