Two decades ago, Lawrence Cohen’s No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things challenged the ways in which we think about aging and senility, kinship and its undoing, medicine and the nation, language and the possibilities of ethnographic writing, and what it means to do the anthropology of South Asia. But its 300-odd pages contain much …
“How about a walk today?” I asked Mr. T each morning I arrived to the hospital, visiting him on my morning rounds. Mr T. grinned back at me from the edge of his bed beneath his bright red veteran’s baseball cap, a sharp contrast to the dull monotone hospital gown. “Oh you betcha, doc,” he smiled. Our daily stroll entailed …
Angela was angry—even now, when I listen to the audio recording, I can hear the bitterness in her voice. We sat in the conference room of the public library near her home, where we had met for a formal interview, and she detailed the reasons for her anger, starting right in even before I had turned on the recorder, such …
I remember when I was a lot younger and my grandmother was still alive, her flat became increasingly filled with small pieces of paper attached by tape to an apparently random collection of things. On each paper was written the name of the object it was stuck to; ‘toaster’, ‘cooker’, ‘sink’, ‘chair’ and so on. Over time, as she forgot …
I have never lost my childhood habit of beachcombing for special rocks and shells, and I think of ethnography as involving a similar process of collecting bits of evidence. Mostly what I collect are words (interviews, quotations, or notes) that I then use to make various kinds of word compositions (descriptions, analyses, arguments, and articles). But words do also have …
Much to our pleasure we got many positive responses following the publication of our series, ‘thinking with dementia’. Some of these responses suggested novel directions in which we could think with dementia. We asked the writers to extend their stories, and invited some more authors to contribute. And so the stories continue!
While much of the research that gave rise …