At the heart of anthropology and the social sciences lies a notion of human existence according to which humans and animals share the basic need for food, but only humans have the capacity for morality. Based on fieldwork in a pig laboratory, a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and a dementia nursing home, we follow practices of feeding precarious lives lacking most markers of human personhood, including the exercise of moral judgment. Despite the absence of such markers, laboratory researchers and caregivers in these three sites do not abstain from engaging in questions about the moral status of the piglets, infants, and people with dementia in their care. They continually negotiate how their charges belong to the human collectivity and thereby challenge the notion of 'the human' that is foundational to anthropology. Combining analytical approaches that do not operate with a fixed boundary between human and animal value and agency with approaches that focus on human experience and virtue ethics, we argue that 'the human' at stake in the moral laboratory of feeding precarious lives puts 'the human' in anthropology at disposal for moral experimentation.
How do time and personhood become related when dementia sets in? This article brings together ethnographies from a memory clinic and a dementia nursing home in Copenhagen, Denmark, pursuing how personhood and time become intertwined across early and late-stage dementia. In the memory clinic, the dementia diagnosis is enacted and experienced simultaneously as an indispensable prophecy of discontinuity of personhood and life for the patients, and as a prognosis that renders the future indeterminate and open to intervention. In the nursing home, institutionalized care marks the fulfillment of the prophecy of decline, yet nursing home staff insist on practicing prognoses for the residents. Across our empirical sites, we enquire what the tension between prophecy and prognosis mean for personhood and the possibilities of the present, arguing that people with dementia are made and unmade through different understandings and enactments of future-oriented temporalities.
This article investigates how a person with dementia is made up through intersubjective acts of recognition. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish memory clinic, we show that identification of disease requires patients to be substituted by their relatives in constructing believable medical narratives; yet during memory testing, patients are not allowed any substitution to clearly expose cognitive shortcomings. In combining works of theorists Ian Hacking and Paul Ricoeur, we argue that the clinical identification of dementia unmakes the knowing subject, a deconstruction that threatens to misrecognize and humiliate the person under examination. The article ends by proposing that dementia be the condition that forces us to rethink our ways of recognizing persons more generally. Thus, dementia diagnostics provide insights into different enactments of the person that invite us to explore practices of substitution and modes of interaction emerging when our fundamental dependency becomes unquestionable.
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