Time and Personhood across Early and Late-Stage Dementia

Abstract

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.

The Experience of Lived Time in People with Dementia: A Systematic Meta-Synthesis

“…Sometimes people liked to root themselves in the past to help maintain their personhood. This confirms what other researchers have found that time and personhood are inevitably intertwined for people with dementia [91]. According to Flaherty, “time work functions as a temporal lathe with which to modify the contour of one’s personal experience” [89].…”

How Communicative Approaches Enrich the Study of Care

“…The analysis of temporality, whether in face-to-face encounters or across the life course, is a significant aspect of medical anthropological perspectives on care (Andaya 2019;Gjødsbøl and Svendsen 2019;Jain and Kaufman 2011;Svendsen et al 2018). In contexts of care, the examination of temporality -for instance, the rhythmic patterning of ritualized speech and song in healing encounters -yields important insights into the role of communication in health and illness (Hinton and Kirmayer 2017;Throop 2010).…”

Visiting Hours: Spacetimes of Human–Animal Interaction in South African Elder Care

“…Medical anthropologists also show how human-animal or more than human relations can emerge in care spaces and also reshape temporal experiences and expectations-despite and because of species alterities and institutional protocols (Gjødsbøl and Svendsen 2019;Han 2020;Savishinsky 1985Savishinsky , 1991Svendsen et al 2018;see Munn 1970see Munn , 1986. 5 In an ethnographic counterpoint to the majority research on older adults' timed therapeutic exposure to animals, Savishinsky (1985Savishinsky ( , 1991 found that animals brought into nursing homes incited older adults to reflect on personal and social issues that also had temporal dimensions.…”