In one of her last articles, K. von Benda-Beckmann explores the notion of embeddedness of persons in their social world and how this relates to their duty of care (2021). She found that there may be different degrees of embeddedness; that some people are not only bounded to their social relations and environment, but also that their selves extended to include their social world. She suggested a differentiated analysis that could account for these differences and expects this to benefit in understanding care relations and, on a practical front, to offer unexpected strategies in dealing with injuries. This paper continues this framework by looking into legal pluralism and the relinquishing of legal personhood of elderly parents across different levels of social organizations, from the decision-making within families and into the courtrooms. What are the reasons for- and how are individuals being declared as no longer having agency or legal personhood (legal competency)? How does this relate to extending proper care to family members and (or in opposition to) others? And in more abstract terms, how is law translated from cognitive conception to become institutionalized or systematized? Through an analysis of court decisions and interviews, this paper demonstrates the relationship between social security and dependency. It studies the complex ways in which individual and collective human agency relates to social security structures and institutions.
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