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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic work in the Netherlands, I explore ‘generational openings’ invited by dementia. I argue that attending to such openings helps unravel the intertwining of two differences key to 'good' anthropology's envisioning of better lives against the backdrop of social critique.

Paper long abstract

The study of ‘difference’ has long been both one of anthropology’s most distinctive and most contested features. This is again highlighted in recent debates on an anthropology of the good (see Robbins 2023; Ortner 2016), which centre on the kind of ‘difference’ deemed best able to give anthropology its voice. I build on the critical phenomenological distinction between difference as pertaining to social positioning and difference as an interruptive singularity (Dyring 2024; Mattingly 2022; Guenther 2011). I do so to analyse how life with dementia’s rubbing together of social and temporal folds of generationality (O’Byrne 2023) allows paradigmatic insight into ways of combining social critique and showcasing better ways of living (Ortner 2016).

I draw on five years of fieldwork on everyday lives with dementia in the Netherlands, zooming in on a friendship between two community-dwelling men living with early-onset dementia. Exploring their shared time, I suggest that their different social positionings and opposing views of dementia as either a source of suffering or as inspiring the good life were generatively unsettled in moments of mutual imagination and play.

I elaborate on such moments as ‘generational openings’, exploring how the study of these ‘openings’ may both help to describe generative events that arise when generational time folds in unpredictable ways, and point a way forward in efforts to envision better ways of living against the backdrop of social critique.