Short Abstract

This panel explores how dementia can help us as anthropologists to critically think about differences, the relation between anthropologies of suffering and of the good, and our methods.

Long Abstract

Under the heading “Senility as a Matter of Voice” Cohen (2006) raised the intriguing question of how it is that among three great figures of mental anguish prominent in European thought before the 19th century – melancholy, lunacý and senility – the two first became central to the reflexive accounting of modernity. Senility, however, became a figure disjunctive from the self-understanding of European modernity. Taking up Cohen’s call to not only think about but also with senility – or dementia – , we ask: If dementia had a voice, what would it say? What can we learn from dementia about living in polarized worlds?

Grasping the other has been quintessential to the influential ‘personhood turn’ scholars. Ever since Kitwood suggested the medical model of dementia could be turned on its head in the early 1990s, anthropologists have explored how our methods and key concepts may be transformed in order to understand and critically work with dementia’s difference. In this panel, we home in on how more recent anthropological work is thinking with dementia: What potentialities are emerging in various ways of thinking with difference? What might the multiplicity of diverging voices encountered in lives with dementia teach us about the relation between anthropologies of suffering and of the good? How to rethink our methods from the in-between formed in lives, societies and research with dementia? And what forms of critique do these questions point to? We especially welcome empirical contributions from other parts of the world than Europe or the US.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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