Paper long abstract:

How do our values influence our imagination of what is threatening? What ideas of life quality and human dignity do we have? Which values conduct our understanding of good care?

This themes were subject of my ethnographic research in Germany about the caring situation between adult children and spouses on the one side and parents or spouses with dementia on the other side. Cultural values like autonomy and independence are central in the handling with dementia and create specific conflicts in the caring situation. Carer and the person with dementia are co-dependent.

At the same time there is a great influence on the handling by the societal view of dementia, connoted often with mind loss and imagined as an enemy which has to be combated, as the recently inaugurated German "National centre to combat dementia" symbolises.