What makes our work anthropological? Speaking from my experience of walking with nursing home residents, I follow Ingold to suggest that participant observation is a practice in which anthropologists do not study other people but study and work with people, which makes it distinctive and valuable.
Paper long abstract:
What makes our work uniquely anthropological? Speaking from my own experience of working with nursing home residents with dementia, I follow Ingold (2021b) to suggest that participant observation is a particular practice in which anthropologists do not study other people: we study and work with people. This distinguishes our work from other social studies of human conditions.
One of the most devastating effects of bodily decline is cognitive impairment. The majority of nursing home residents suffer cognitive impairment to varying degrees, which affects their capacities to reflect upon and articulate their thoughts and feelings. Given its emphasis on the necessity of language and mental capacity in knowledge production, interview-based nursing home studies often exclude residents who could not talk coherently and give informed consent due to dementia. Struggling with how to communicate with residents to understand their experiences of daily care delivery, I was faced with the question: What can I know when residents can no longer tell?
Instead of posing the question, "What can we know?", staff in the care facilities ask, "What should we do?" to care for residents who have transcended the limits of knowing through verbal communication. While knowing where the challenge lies, they still strive to care beyond the limits. Despite the loss of speech, staff can gain access, through increased sensibility and sensitivity, to a tacit dimension of knowing as they carry out their intimate care work, such as assisting residents to walk.
In this paper, I will draw on my fieldwork to show how, by learning from staff and following in their footsteps, I could find the pathway leading to the experiential dimensions of people who are old, frail and cared for in an institutional setting. Spending many fieldwork hours in the corridors and communal areas of the care facilities, I engaged myself in the process of participating, observing, reflecting, describing and communicating. The issue of residents' walking was felt, seen, written, thought through and discussed. The entire process made it possible for me to have different experiences, see from different perspectives and combine different practices into developing my own understanding of whether and how residents are assisted to walk in the nursing homes.
For both Kant (1996, 2018) and Foucault (2005), anthropology constantly questions the limits of human knowledge and the nature of concrete existence. The question of finitude has become fundamental since Kant, and for Foucault, anthropology offers no solution. Yet, my 12-months fieldwork in two aged care homes in Adelaide, South Australia leads me to contend that the work of anthropology extends beyond the accustomed ways of knowledge production to explore the tacit or hidden dimensions of human experience. In doing so, the value of work that anthropologists do can be seen through the acquisition of a comparative and critical understanding of human beings in the one world we co-inhabit (Ingold 2021b).
Accepted Contribution:
Contribution description:
Paper long abstract:
What makes our work uniquely anthropological? Speaking from my own experience of working with nursing home residents with dementia, I follow Ingold (2021b) to suggest that participant observation is a particular practice in which anthropologists do not study other people: we study and work with people. This distinguishes our work from other social studies of human conditions.
One of the most devastating effects of bodily decline is cognitive impairment. The majority of nursing home residents suffer cognitive impairment to varying degrees, which affects their capacities to reflect upon and articulate their thoughts and feelings. Given its emphasis on the necessity of language and mental capacity in knowledge production, interview-based nursing home studies often exclude residents who could not talk coherently and give informed consent due to dementia. Struggling with how to communicate with residents to understand their experiences of daily care delivery, I was faced with the question: What can I know when residents can no longer tell?
Instead of posing the question, "What can we know?", staff in the care facilities ask, "What should we do?" to care for residents who have transcended the limits of knowing through verbal communication. While knowing where the challenge lies, they still strive to care beyond the limits. Despite the loss of speech, staff can gain access, through increased sensibility and sensitivity, to a tacit dimension of knowing as they carry out their intimate care work, such as assisting residents to walk.
In this paper, I will draw on my fieldwork to show how, by learning from staff and following in their footsteps, I could find the pathway leading to the experiential dimensions of people who are old, frail and cared for in an institutional setting. Spending many fieldwork hours in the corridors and communal areas of the care facilities, I engaged myself in the process of participating, observing, reflecting, describing and communicating. The issue of residents' walking was felt, seen, written, thought through and discussed. The entire process made it possible for me to have different experiences, see from different perspectives and combine different practices into developing my own understanding of whether and how residents are assisted to walk in the nursing homes.
For both Kant (1996, 2018) and Foucault (2005), anthropology constantly questions the limits of human knowledge and the nature of concrete existence. The question of finitude has become fundamental since Kant, and for Foucault, anthropology offers no solution. Yet, my 12-months fieldwork in two aged care homes in Adelaide, South Australia leads me to contend that the work of anthropology extends beyond the accustomed ways of knowledge production to explore the tacit or hidden dimensions of human experience. In doing so, the value of work that anthropologists do can be seen through the acquisition of a comparative and critical understanding of human beings in the one world we co-inhabit (Ingold 2021b).
Anthropology as education
Session 1