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Paper short abstract

Anthropology has long discussed how “the other” is represented. Drawing on ethnographic research in Denmark, our paper explores tensions in portraying dementia, balancing agency and struggle. It argues that dementia’s ambivalence holds a potential to bridge “good” and “dark” anthropology.

Paper long abstract

Anthropologists have long been conscious that the writing and representation of cultural differences also entails the power to define and construct “the other” (Clifford & Marcus 1986, Said 1978). Within anthropological studies of dementia, scholars have been profoundly influenced by the “personhood turn” (Kitwood 1997), which rightly challenges dehumanising portrayals but also installs a moral imperative to foreground agency and a positive outlook. While productive in a dominant backdrop of the haunting image of dementia as inevitable loss and despair, we ask what may be flattened when representation is guided too rigidly by this framework?

Drawing on extensive ethnographic research conducted among people with dementia and relatives in Denmark, we examine a central tension that has shaped our own research and writing: How to convey lived experiences of dementia in ways that acknowledge dementia’s generative potentials while remaining attentive to the very real struggles it involves?

Presenting ethnographic examples of life with dementia from both ends of the spectrum, we approach dementia as a form of cognitive variation that “speaks back” through its effects, socialities, and ambiguities. Our contribution is not a resolution but an attempt at balance: holding vulnerability and dignity, loss and meaning, together without collapsing one into the other. By insisting on the omnipresent ambivalences in life with dementia, we argue that dementia presents itself as a critical potential to bridge the continuous debate between the anthropology of good (Robbins 2013, 2023) and dark anthropology (Ortner 2016).