Abstract

This article critically engages with the predominant understandings of repetitive bodily practices within a dementia context. Rather than interpreting such practices as pathological and abnormal, I instead approach them through an ethnographic mapping, paying particular attention to the affective dynamics of repetition. Critically developing Fernand Deligny’s insights and methods of tracing and mapping bodily movements in dialogue with Tim Ingold’s notion of dwelling, I demonstrate affect-underpinned encounters and interactions of repetitive phenomena. I then argue for the extension of recent anthropological discussions about affect, repetition, and subjectivity by suggesting a more productive dialogue among theories of affect, body, atmosphere, cognition, memory, language, and life history.

Highlights

  • Over the course of a decade of voluntary work, and a year’s intensive fieldwork in an Orthodox Jewish care home (‘the Home’) in London from 2014 to 2015,1 I observed the somewhat repetitive bodily practices of residents living with dementia

  • I suggest that the subject is a being-in-becoming; that is, that dementia emerges in the process of dynamic, complex, and recurrent interactions, responses, and encounters with its immediate surroundings

  • What do Daniella and Ayla’s repetitive practices do? By shifting the intellectual focus from the causes or meanings of these bodily experiences to their values and functions, the affective dynamics of repetition in individual residents invite us to consider an alternative to conventional approaches and analytical tools

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Summary

Introduction

Over the course of a decade of voluntary work, and a year’s intensive fieldwork in an Orthodox Jewish care home (‘the Home’) in London from 2014 to 2015,1 I observed the somewhat repetitive bodily practices of residents living with dementia. Care workers often perceived and described these journeys in a negative way, drawing attention to residents’ repetitive sayings, behaviours, and actions, such as obsessing about a particular seat, pacing, murmuring, asking the same questions, uttering the same statements, knocking, withdrawing, and so forth. They treated Daniella and Ayla’s bodily practices as either just signs of institutional routinisation, or as behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia – referring, for example, to Daniella’s ‘wandering’ and ‘obsession’ and Ayla’s ‘anxiety disorders’ and ‘depression’. I suggest that the subject is a being-in-becoming; that is, that dementia emerges in the process of dynamic, complex, and recurrent interactions, responses, and encounters with its immediate surroundings

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