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

Cheryl Mattingly is Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Southern California. She is an award-winning author and coeditor of multiple books, journal special issues, and articles on chronic illness, disability, and ethics from phenomenological perspectives. Single-authored books include Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience (Cambridge, 1998); The Paradox of Hope (University of California Press, 2010); and Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life (University of California Press, 2014). Coedited collections include Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life (Berghahn, 2018); “Toward a New Humanism: An Approach from Philosophical Anthropology” (HAU, 2018); and Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing (University of California Press, 2000).

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Lone Grøn is Professor (WSR) at VIVE—The Danish Center for Social Science Research. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on the lived experience of chronic illness, obesity, kinship, aging, and dementia in Denmark, including several coedited volumes of journal special issues: “Contagious Kinship Connections” (Grøn and Meinert 2020, Ethnos); “Social Contagion and Cultural Epidemics: Phenomenological Perspectives” (Meinert and Grøn 2017, Ethos); and “Moral (and Other) Laboratories” (Grøn and Kuan 2017, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry).

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Lisa Stevenson is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University and author of Life beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (University of California Press, 2014). Her recent work (e.g., “Looking Away” [Cultural Anthropology 2020]) focuses on what it means to think in images. As an anthropologist she has attempted to trace and describe such imagistic forms of thought in the everyday worlds of people in situations of violence—among the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic and among Colombian refugees in Ecuador.

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Robert Desjarlais is Professor of Anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of several books, including Subject to Death: Life and Loss in a Buddhist World (University of California Press, 2016); The Blind Man: A Phantasmography (Fordham University Press, 2019); and Traces of Violence: Writings on the Disaster in Paris, France (University of California Press, 2022; coauthored with Khalil Habrih).

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Rasmus Dyring is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Aarhus University. Among Dyring’s works are “From Moral Facts to Human Finitude: On the Problem of Freedom in the Anthropology of Ethics” (HAU, 2018); “The Futures of ‘Us’: A Critical Phenomenology of the Aporias of Ethical Community in the Anthropocene” (Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2021); and “Ellen and the Little One: A Critical Phenomenology of Potentiality in Life with Dementia” (coauthored with Lone Grøn, Anthropological Theory, 2022).

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Harmandeep Kaur Gill is the recipient of the Carlsberg Foundation Visiting Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of Oxford (2022–24). Gill works with Tibetans living in exile in India and Nepal. Her PhD dissertation (2020), “Things Fall Apart: Coming to Terms with Old Age, Solitude, and Death among Elderly Tibetans in Exile,” explored experiences of old age and attitudes toward death and rebirth among elderly Tibetans.

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Maria Louw is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University. She is the author of Everyday Islam in Post -Soviet Central Asia (Routledge, 2007) and coeditor, with Cheryl Mattingly, Rasmus Dyring, and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, of Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life (Berghahn, 2018), as well as author of numerous articles and book chapters dealing with religion, secularism, atheism, morality, ethics, and care in Central Asia.

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Lotte Meinert is Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University. She is the author of Hopes in Friction: Schooling, Health, and Everyday Life in Uganda (Information Age, 2009) and the coeditor of In the Event: The Anthropology of Generic Moments (Berghahn, 2015); Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality: Time Objectified (Temple University Press, 2014); Time Work: Studies of Temporal Agency (Berghahn, 2020); Bio-Social Worlds: Anthropology of Health Environments beyond Determinism (UCL Press, 2020); and Configuring Contagion: Ethnographies of Biosocial Epidemics (Berghahn, 2021).

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Maria Speyer is a visual artist represented by Galleri Stokkebro, Denmark. She has illustrated picture books for Høst & Søn and Turbine, Denmark. Her most recent picture book, A Feather on A Wing (University of Queensland Press, 2022), seeks to alleviate feelings of disconnection and loneliness by exploring metaphors that speak of the singular and the collective.

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Helle Sofie Wentzer is Senior Researcher at VIVE —The Danish Center for Social Science Research. She has written numerous book chapters and articles on health care interaction, communication, and technology, including “Technology in Context: Vulnerability in Surgery” in Context in Action and How to Study It (Oxford University Press, 2019). She is currently writing the monograph (in Danish) A Safe Meeting—Reorganizing Outpatient Clinics for Covid-19 (VIVE), and contributing to the book Interdisciplinary and Cross-sectorial Collaboration in Nursing (Danish), ed. Ditte Høgsgaard (FADL), with the chapter “Complexity and Entirety in the Care Pathways of Patient-Citizens.”

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Susan Reynolds Whyte is Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. She carries out research in East Africa on social efforts to secure well-being in the face of poverty, ill health, conflict, and rapid change. Among other works, she has authored or edited Disability and Culture (University of California Press, 1995); Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in Eastern Uganda (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Social Lives of Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 2002); Disability in Local and Global Worlds (University of California Press, 2007); and Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda (Duke University Press, 2014).

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“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,