Paper short abstract:

Drawing on Ingold’s dwelling perspective and Wetherell’s affective practices I demonstrate how a person living with dementia responds to her vulnerable and anxious feelings, imaginations and/or emotions, focusing in particular on her affective performativity.

Paper long abstract:

What if a woman living with dementia in a care home keeps telling you that she wants to go home? How would you react, and what would you do? In what way can we, as anthropologists, approach and understand the situation and person ethnographically when studying dementia? Drawing on Ingold’s dwelling perspective and Wetherell’s affective practices I demonstrate how the woman who desires to go home responds to her vulnerable and anxious feelings, imaginations and/or emotions. Accordingly, I demonstrate the affective performativity through which she resonates with her ever-changing worldly surroundings. I argue that her bodily sayings, doings and actions should not be perceived as mere pathological symptoms but as forms of co-dwelling within her limited capacity, which becomes a particular way of encountering and (un)familiarising with her utmost existential crisis. Finally, I suggest that we pay more attention to the situation that she is saturated and quite often overwhelmed by, that ‘allow’ her bodily affective attentions and attunements, rather than focusing on what she is capable of.