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Paper short abstract

In Yarumal, Colombia, where many families live with hereditary early-onset Alzheimer’s, promising is shaped by anticipated forgetting. This paper asks why people keep promising to those who will forget, and how promises persist through artifacts and embodied practices beyond speech and memory.

Paper long abstract

In Yarumal, Colombia, about 6,000 people descend from a common ancestor, and roughly 1,200 carry a genetic mutation that causes hereditary early-onset Alzheimer’s. They are the largest known family lineage in the world with this disease. Symptoms appear around age forty, sometimes earlier, when many are still raising children and caring for parents. Within a single household, several people may be in different stages of the disease, making the work of keeping promises a shared, intergenerational task. In this setting, even simple promises (e.g., “I’ll be back this afternoon”) become difficult: those who make them and those who receive them know that forgetting awaits. Yet people keep promising.

This paper asks (1) why people make and keep promises to those who will forget, and (2) how promises enter the intimate spaces of the family. Drawing on medical records, everyday family artifacts, and body readings, it traces how promise-keeping persists and is continually renegotiated beyond speech and individual cognition. More broadly, it offers ethnographic insight into a foundational moral-philosophical question: what binds us to one another across memory and forgetting? In a town where people keep promising despite forgetting, I ask what kinds of language, artifacts, and care make promises possible.