Imagistic Care

Mattingly

Description

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 Grn, Maria Louw, Cheryl Mattingly, Lotte Meinert, Maria Speyer, Helle S. Wentzer, Susan Reynolds Whyte

Sujets

• History of medicine

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823299669
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 24 Mo

Extrait

Imagistic Care

Thinking from Elsewhere Series editors: Clara Han, Johns Hopkins University Bhrigupati Singh, Ashoka University and Brown University Andrew Brandel, Harvard University International Advisory Board: Roma Chatterji, University of Delhi Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University Robert Desjarlais, Sarah Lawrence College Harri Englund, Cambridge University Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton Angela Garcia, Stanford University Junko Kitanaka, Keio University Eduardo Kohn, McGill University Heonik Kwon, Cambridge University Michael Lambek, University of Toronto Deepak Mehta, Ashoka University, Sonepat Amira Mittermaier, University of Toronto Sameena Mulla, Emory University Marjorie Murray, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Young-Gyung Paik, Jeju National University Sarah Pinto, Tufts University Michael Puett, Harvard University Fiona Ross, University of Cape Town Lisa Stevenson, McGill University

I M A G I S T I C C A R E Growing Old in a Precarious World

Ch e r y l M a t t i n g l y a n d Lon e Gr øn , Ed i t o r s Drawings by Maria Speyer

Foreword by Lisa Stevenson

Afterword by Robert Desjarlais

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS New York 2022

Copyright © 2022 Fordham University Press

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Printed in the United States of America

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C O N T E N T S

Foreword Lisa Stevenson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v.ii . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction:Imagistic Inquiries: Old Age, Intimate Others, and Care Lone Grøn and Cheryl Mattingly. . . . . . . .. .1. . . . . The Gift:An Imagistic Critical Phenomenology Cheryl Mattingly . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. .3.1. . . . . . . . . . . Virtuous Aging in Uncanny Moral Worlds:Being Old and Kyrgyz in the Absence of the Young Maria Louw. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.9. . . . . . . . . . . . . “Yeah . . . Yeah”:Imagistic Signatures and Responsive Events in a Danish Dementia Ward Lone Grøn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8.3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On the Silent Anarchy of Intimacy: Images of Alterity, Openness, and Sociality in Life with Dementia Rasmus Dyring . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...1.09. . . . . . . . . . . .

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Together Apart:Fence Work in Landscapes of Relationality, Old Age, and Care in the Ik Mountains Lotte Meinert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..1.37. . . . . . . . . . . . . Imagining Self and Other:Carers, TV, and Touch Harmandeep Kaur Gill. . . . . . . . . . . ..1.63. . . . . . . . . Virtues and Vexations:Intimate Others Caring for Elders in Eastern Uganda Susan Reynolds Whyte. . . . . . . . . . . ..1.87. . . . . . . . . The Staircase:The Ethics of “Transcendence and Height” in Welfare Care Helle Sofie Wentzer . . . . . . . . . . . . .. .20.9 . . . . . . . . . . The Drawing Underneath Maria Speyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...2.29. . . . . . . . . . . . . Afterword:These Images Burn Robert Desjarlais.. . . . . . . . . . . . ..  . 25.1. . . . . . . . . . .

List of Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Contents

261 265

F O R E W O R D

l isa s t ev e n s o n

It’s strange, I know, to begin a foreword to an extraordinary book about care at theendof life with some reflections onbeginnings. But still, it’s the ques- tion that preoccupies me as I read the chapters and look at the images in this book: What can we say about what it is to begin, and to begin again? And what might the answer to that question have to do with the end and with endings more generally? In a touching essay about the painting of Paul Cézanne, Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests that Cézanne’s paintings were his attempt “to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization” (1964, 13). We have only to think of Cézanne’s paintings of the trees that seem to be in the process of disentangling them- selves from the blue streaks of sky around them to see what Merleau-Ponty means. What he particularly admired in Cézanne’s work was his ability to make visible, or slow down, through his painterly form of attention, the coming-into-focus of the world. This, I will argue, is what the chapters and drawings in this volume also do. This question of beginnings also preoccupied Walter Benjamin. In an es- say on the history of photography he suggests that while it is possible, “however roughly, to describe the way somebody walks, . . . it is impossible to say anything about that fraction of a second when a personstarts to walk” (Benjamin 1972, 7). For Benjamin, the moment of beginning to walk is an example of a perceptual experience that resides in our “optical unconscious” (7), one that only photography—(and previously psychoanalysis) might bring to our attention. I wonder what might have happened had Cézanne

tried his painterly hand at portraying the instant someone begins to walk, or better—begins to speak. Merleau-Ponty, in the essay on Cézanne, is also interested in this kind of beginning—what we might call the beginning of expression. Not only does Cézanne’s art attempt to portray the “beginnings” of vision—or what I am calling a “coming-to-see”—but the very act of putting brush to canvas (to make visible that process of coming-to-see) is also its own beginning. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “Cézanne’s difficulties are those of the first word. He considered himself powerless because he was not omnipotent, because he was not God and wanted nevertheless to portray the world . . . to make visiblehow the worldtouchesus” (1964, 19). Merleau-Ponty thus locates the story of Genesis (of the first word) in each of our lives and asks, What is it to begin to speak? Or to begin to paint? Or even—to begin to howl? And importantly for this volume,What is it to begin at the end? In a theater workshop for Colombian migrants to Ecuador, one of the participants was a woman who was living in a kind of prolonged despair about the loss of her family, the health of her child, and the seeming impos- sibility of a return to the everyday. At one point, my friend—anthropologist and theater director Cristiana Giordano—asked each person in the group to interact in some way with the theatrical affordances of the room, begin- 1 ning with the simple statement “I begin” and ending with “I end.” People stood inside doorframes, slid along the floor, rapped on the glass windows. When it was her turn, this woman was stymied, seemingly unable to be- gin. Then she said the required words, “I begin,” walked over to the wall, and slowly moved her finger along the smooth crevice between the painted bricks. When she had finished, she began to weep, and a friend caught her jubilantly in her arms. She had begun. Tracing the line between the bricks was a first word. It seems to me that in his essay on Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty is interested in that moment when tracing one’s finger along the wall is also a first word. It’s the point where perceiving the world and the possibility of expression meet—the point where to see or perceive is also to express. So, when Cézanne says of his process of painting, “The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness,” Merleau-Ponty adds, “[Art] is a process of expressing” (1964, 17). Seeing (becoming conscious) is a process of expressing, and expression a process of seeing. Merleau-Ponty continues, “There is nothing but a vague fever before the act of artistic expression, and only the work

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Lisa Stevenson

itself, completed and understood, is proof that there wassomethingrather thannothingto be said” (19). Merleau-Ponty acknowledges that in this attention to beginnings—this attention to what it is to come-to-see, this attention to the first word—so much is at stake, and that Cézanne often wondered if he were equal to the task. There is a sense that for Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne is working at the be- ginning of the world—perhaps one could say at the beginning-end of the world, at the point where life shades into death. In what is, for me, one of the most important lines of the essay, he writes, “If one looks at the work of other painters after seeing Cézanne’s paintings, one feels somehow relaxed, just as conversations resumed after a period of mourning mask the abso- lute change and give back to the survivors their solidity” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 16). In the space remaining, I want to draw an analogy between the authors in this volume and Cézanne as a painter. In their mode of paying attention to the lives of the elderly with whom they have sat, talked, andstraggled, these writers, through their acute and sometimes gutting descriptions, in- vite us, as their readers, to remain a while longer with the “absolute change,” and the lack of solidity, that death—or dying, or living on the cusp of death— entails. This space of change (absolute or not) that is old age, where deter- minate forms seem to dissolve, is also the space of much, very revealing, 2 expressivity. This is not to say that the “resumed conversations” of “other painters” aren’t important, and even the most subtle form of kindness. There is relief in the resumption of conversation. There is solace even, as the game of life, of polite conversation, of social roles, of familiar ways of being, start up again, and the skin of social life closes over the wound of death, masking its “absolute change.” But to extend Merleau-Ponty’s analogy—if other paint- ers provide the relief of polite conversation, then Cézanne, and the authors in this volume, provide us, I suppose, with something more akin to the mourner’s cry. Let me explain. The mourner, in witnessing (seeing) the ab- solute change that death brings, is simultaneously expressing it. But the mourner’s lament, while expressing something, is not, I think, formulating anything. If you were to ask the person crying what they were cryingabout, would they not either rebuff the question or say something like, “Everything. And nothing.”? Is it not difficult—and perhaps impossible—for the anthro- pologist to say exactly what a mourner’s cry means, or to translate it into a

Foreword

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