Imagistic Care – Growing Old in a Precarious World: Thinking from Elsewhere

"Taking us into the vast and wild realms that lie beyond our immediately given everyday existence, this courageous collection offers new and original perspectives on processes of aging. Exploring shadowy worlds of dreams and memories, of ghosts and specters, of pasts that refuse to let people go, the book is a landmark contribution to the emerging field of imagistic scholarship."--Tine M. Gammeltoft, University of Copenhagen

"The essays in this book present sensitive, thoughtfully rendered comparative ethnographies of care in late life. These ethnographies span a remarkable geographic and contextual range, from a dementia ward in Denmark, to homes of older African Americans in Los Angeles, to apartments in Kyrgyzstan, to villages in Uganda. Together, they comprise a stunningly varied array of experiences of care in later life 'in contexts where aging is marked by profound bodily or social precarity.' With societies around the world growing proportionally older, these careful ethnographically grounded analyses of care in late life are of utmost importance both to anthropology and to society."--Jessica Robbins, Wayne State University

Imagistic Care explores ethnographically how images function in our concepts, our writing, our fieldwork, and our lives. With contributions from anthropologists, philosophers and an artist, the volume asks: How can imagistic inquiries help us understand the complex entanglements of self and other, dependence and independency, frailty and charisma, notions of good and bad aging, and norms and practices of care in old age? And how can imagistic inquiries offer grounds for critique?

Cutting between ethnography, phenomenology and art, this volume offers a powerful contribution to understandings of growing old. The images created in words and drawings are used to complicate rather than simplify the world. The contributors advance an understanding of care, and of aging itself, marked by alterity, spectral presences and uncertainty.

Cheryl Mattingly is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California and Professor of Anthropology and Philosophy at Aarhus University.

Lone Grøn is Professor (WSR) at VIVE Danish Center for Social Science Research.

Contributors: Rasmus Dyring, Harmandeep Kaur Gill, Lone Grøn, Maria Louw, Cheryl Mattingly, Lotte Meinert, Maria Speyer, Helle S. Wentzer, Susan Reynolds Whyte