“Mine is an illness of time.” […] “Time has no cure.”
— Catarina
(Joao Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, 2005: 107)
Chronic is a temporal loop: it recursively, discursively, iteratively reproduces human experience. In the domain of health and illness, this reproduction perpetuates passing time as extending suffering and stalling the very dynamic of living. …
Karen, who has lived with type 1 diabetes for three years, explains how she is only just starting to properly manage her daily self-care, and how it interrupts her various daily routines. “There are so many unpredictable issues surrounding self-management, and learning never stops”, she says, while she accentuates all her doubts about self-care: “What will happen, …
Chronicity, ageing, and social life
Old-age related health conditions evolve into both a dynamic and an inert chronicity which, in the end, produces a particular quality of life when growing old: the chronification of uncertainty, insecurity, and unpredictability (Manderson, Cartwright & Hardon 2016; Eeuwijk 2020). The fragility and volatility of individual biologies cascades older persons not only into new bodily …
When a person with dementia moves into a nursing home, he/she is not only physically transferred from one location to another; the relocation also involves a reconfiguration of everyday and intimate relationships of care. Whereas everyday life before the placement is primarily shared between persons with dementia and family members (1), care professionals and other residents now become the ones …
“My grandmother does a lot of ‘study (gongbu)’. Those are just some activities, but we named them ‘study’. What motivates her [to engage in those activities] is her desire not to get dementia, and it’s effective anyways.”
Mrs. Choi was diagnosed with dementia in 2013, but she has never been told about the diagnosis. Her family was …
“I will never return to that Zone of Death! You too should try to follow this diet to nurture life.” Aunt Minh[i](Fieldwork notes, February 2018)
We first met Aunt Minh and Aunt Khai a few days after the Vietnamese Lunar New Year in early 2018 during our first field research trip to “Xóm sống vui” (“Happy life village”) …