TY - JOUR
T1 - A life worth living
T2 - Temporality, care, and personhood in the Danish welfare state
AU - Svendsen, Mette Nordahl
AU - Navne, Laura Emdal
AU - Gjødsbøl, Iben Mundbjerg
AU - Dam, Mie Seest
PY - 2018/2/1
Y1 - 2018/2/1
N2 - Caregiving can be conceptualized as involving practices of substitution, in which doctors, nurses, and health assistants step into the subject positions of their charges in order to sustain their personhood and compensate for their reduced capacities. Fieldwork in Denmark at three sites—a neonatal intensive care unit, a research laboratory using piglets as animal models, and a dementia nursing home—shows that temporality is a key component in substitution, as caregivers imagine their charges’ temporal horizons when stimulating their personhood in the ambiguous zone between life and death. Substitution practices redirect our attention from the question of what it means to be human to what it takes to, for example, turn premature infants, research piglets, and people with dementia into beings with worthy lives. [personhood, substitution, temporality, neonatology, animal science, dementia care, Denmark].
AB - Caregiving can be conceptualized as involving practices of substitution, in which doctors, nurses, and health assistants step into the subject positions of their charges in order to sustain their personhood and compensate for their reduced capacities. Fieldwork in Denmark at three sites—a neonatal intensive care unit, a research laboratory using piglets as animal models, and a dementia nursing home—shows that temporality is a key component in substitution, as caregivers imagine their charges’ temporal horizons when stimulating their personhood in the ambiguous zone between life and death. Substitution practices redirect our attention from the question of what it means to be human to what it takes to, for example, turn premature infants, research piglets, and people with dementia into beings with worthy lives. [personhood, substitution, temporality, neonatology, animal science, dementia care, Denmark].
U2 - 10.1111/amet.12596
DO - 10.1111/amet.12596
M3 - Journal article
SN - 0094-0496
VL - 45
SP - 20
EP - 33
JO - American Ethnologist
JF - American Ethnologist
IS - 1
ER -
