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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Ethnographic reflections on selfhood, embodiment and Alzheimer's disease | | Author(s) | Pia C Kontos |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 24, part 6, November 2004 |
| Pages | pp 829-849 |
| Source | http://journals.cambridge.org/ |
| Keywords | Dementia ; Personality ; Attitude ; Cognitive processes ; Quantitative studies ; Canada. |
| Annotation | Explicit in our understanding of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the assumption that memory impairment caused by cognitive deficiencies leads to a steady loss of selfhood. The insistence that selfhood is the exclusive privilege of the sphere of cognition has its origins in the modern western philosophical tradition that separates mind from body, and positions the former as superior to the latter. This dichotomy suggests a fundamental passivity of the body, since it is primarily cognition that is held to be essential to selfhood. In contrast to the assumed erasure of selfhood in AD, and challenging the philosophical underpinnings of this assumption, this paper presents the findings of an ethnographic study of selfhood in AD in a Canadian long-term care facility. It argues and demonstrates that selfhood persists even with severe dementia, because it is an embodied dimension of human existence. Using a framework of embodiment that integrates the perspectives of Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu, it is argued that selfhood is characterised by an observable coherence and capacity for improvisation, and sustained by a pre-reflective level by the primordial and socio-cultural significance of the body. Participants in this study interacted meaningfully with the world through their embodied way of "being in the world". (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-041213001 A |
| Classmark | EA: DK: DP: DA: 3DQ: 7S |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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