What does it mean to be "near" for families with autistic teenagers and young adults in Denmark? We explore this question, drawing upon critical phenomenology and the anthropologies of autism and kinship. More specifically, we investigate how families experience and respond to living with autism in family lives where commonsense notions of closeness and intimacy are not always possible. Following longitudinal fieldwork with eight families, we present examples of entanglements between human and non-human animals as they emerge in disorienting situations, experiences of uncertainty, surprise, and wonder. Through a method and analysis of perplexity, we argue that dwelling on perplexing moments of interspecies relationality not only holds a potential to reveal unconventional and productive modes of relating, but also offers a critical lens on normative frameworks of family life in Denmark.

This article explores temporal and ethical presents in a dementia ward in Denmark. Dementia wards are often portrayed and experienced as uncanny places where time stands still or becomes radically distorted. I approach the ward, however, as an encounter or access into experiences of time that are hidden from view in the outside world where common‐sense conceptions of time (such as clock time, weekdays, months, and years) have a stronger and more persuasive hold on us. With a point of departure in the notions of the ‘ethnographic epoché’ and ‘anarchaeological reduction’, I build on recent developments within critical phenomenology and world philosophies taking my theoretical inspiration from Indian and Tibetan Madhyamaka traditions. I explore multiple temporal appearances at the ward: institutional time; intersubjective, potentially frictional time; resonant time; still time; and ritual‐event time, appearances that are ever‐emerging, blending, and dissolving. In the vocabulary of Madhyamaka philosophy, they appear but are empty, they are empty but appear. Finally, I discuss the ethical implications of a groundless ontology of time for a contemporary Danish ageing landscape characterized by ideals of healthy and active ageing, and propose an ethics of groundless temporal generosity.

What can we learn about temporality by studying different ways of measuring time, institutional time regimes, and (a)typical experiences and creations of time when growing older? This introduction sets perspectives on this question from the anthropologies of ageing, ethics, and temporality. Understanding humans as time beings, we argue that attention to connections between large-scale history, collective temporal registers, and small-scale singularities of the experience of time can reveal and destabilize common representations of ageing and time. We propose an analytical direction that acknowledges and attends to situations of uncertainty and suffering, while also foregrounding questions about 'the good', not only through paying attention to cultural values such as 'active ageing', 'filial piety', or 'desired dependency' (and critiques of them), but also smaller scale, oppositional, and atypical values and poetics of ageing and time. We introduce the contributions in the special issue with close-up ethnographies from Canada, Denmark, India, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Uganda, and the United States, and the core argument across the contributions regarding how time manifests in multiple ways but is ontologically groundless. This lays the ground for critiquing various dogmas about age and time and opens up possibilities of affording plural temporalities in social life.

A wealth of societal concerns about loneliness has surfaced in recent years, raising questions about the negative impacts of increasing social lacks. Exploring a widespread saying among Danish vigil volunteers that “No one should die alone,” we ask: What is at stake in this concern with lonely deaths? And how is relationality practiced at life's end? Inspired by Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology, we explore the concerns and actions of the vigil volunteers as a dynamic of haunting call and hesitant response. The call is voiced in heart‐wrenching images and in more clearly formulated critiques of loneliness in aging and dying processes within a transforming Danish welfare state. The response, “just holding hands,” comprises a “ poeisis of cessation” through minute embodied and sensed acts of being with. The volunteers do not expect their response to remedy the call; they more humbly seek to patch up perceived relational lacks in contemporary Danish society.

For people with mental and somatic illnesses, the interpretive process of attending to a multitude of bodily sensations and recognising them as potential symptoms represents daily and ‘chronic homework’. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark, this study explores diagnostic work and healthcare seeking among people with severe mental and somatic illnesses. As multiple studies have shown, the transformation process for a perceived sensation to become a symptom is a socially constructed interpretative process highly dependent on social legitimisation and shaped by prior cultural knowledge. We found that people with severe mental and somatic illnesses often struggle to ‘read’ the body and its boundaries and to define and distinguish when a symptom becomes a potential sign of illness. Furthermore, they often lack opportunities for social recognition of symptoms due to the absence of social relations. Finally, lifelong experiences with the healthcare system have taught them that they must distinguish between ‘mental’ and ‘somatic’ symptoms to fit the systemic organisation of the healthcare system. This deeply rooted mind-body dualism in the organisation of healthcare services and the daily struggles of diagnostic work to comply with this organisation impacted the interlocutors’ healthcare seeking strategies. Moreover, even though they ‘make up their minds’ to seek healthcare, they risk being met with diagnostic overshadowing and reductionist clinical approaches.

Siden 1990’erne hvor Joan Tronto skrev at ”kreative handlinger og kunst ikke er omsorg”, er der føjet store mængder af litteratur til feltet, der undersøger hvordan kunst og kreativitet kan bidrage med potentiale til omsorg. En stor del af disse perspektiver ser på de forskellige kunstformer som ’redskaber’, der kan bruges som interventioner i forbindelse med pleje og omsorg. Vi ønsker med dette essay at ændre blikretning og bidrage til eksplicitering, re-konfigurering og re-konceptualisering af de potentialer og mulighedsbetingelser, der kan fremme kreativitet i omsorgen, dér hvor den udfolder sig i hverdagslivet. Vi argumenterer for, at sundhedsprofessionelle med fordel kan stille skarpt på mikroperspektivet og de kreative praksisser der hele tiden finder sted i vores hverdagsliv, når vi eksempelvis bruger vores evner til at improvisere, være innovative og fleksible, og dermed skaber meningsfulde tilpasninger i hverdagen. Ved at nedtone fokus på individuelle psykologiske fænomener, og dreje det mod en relationel kontekst, det vil sige en mere nuanceret sociologisk-ontologisk og situeret åbenhed og forståelse af kreativitet, kan der findes nye verdenåbnende omsorgspotentialer. Vi argumenterer for, at der i dette relationelle ’mellemrum’ findes intense øjeblikke af resonans, der, hvis vi er opmærksomme, kan opdages og skabe fælles flowfyldte og meningsfulde situationer, og muligheder, der kan fremme inklusion af mennesker som aktive medskabere af deres livsverdener.

In this article, we outline a critical phenomenology of potentiality as it emerges in life with dementia. Foregrounding the sources of everyday creativity that are part of life with dementia, we propose a critical counter-argument to that of dementia as a form of living death. Our ethnographic vantage point is an episode we encountered during fieldwork at a dementia unit in Denmark. Here, one of the residents of the unit, Ellen, is interrupted in her ways of inhabiting the world by an intimate encounter with a polymorphous creature she calls ‘the Little One’. We argue that this interruption is an ontological event that ushers in new meaningful possibilities for Ellen and the Little One—and for Ellen’s relatives, caregivers, and several other residents—to co-inhabit the world. In critical dialogue with recent theoretical developments in the anthropology of cognitive disability and the ontological turn, we develop a differential social ontology capable of tracing how such interruptions characterize everyday life at the unit—and how various ways of responding to the potentiality of interruptions form responsive communities of care that cross often profound differences between people and between humans and non-humans, such as Ellen and the Little One. We conclude by briefly sketching some implications of these arguments for the care ethics that underlie institutional practices of dementia care.

Touch is a fundamental sense and the most unexplored of the five senses, despite its significance for everything we do in relation to ourselves and others. Studies have shown that touch generates trust, care and comfort and is essential for constituting the body. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this study explores the absence and presence of touch in interactions between people with mental illness and professionals, in health care encounters with general practitioners, neurologists and physiotherapists, as well as masseurs. We found that touch and physical examination of patients with mental illness is absent in health care encounters, leaving the patients with feelings of being out of place, misunderstood, less socially approved and less worthy of trust. Drawing on Honneth and Guenther, we conclude that touch and being touched is an essential dimension of recognition-both of the patients' bodily sensations and symptoms and of them as human beings, detached from the psychiatric label-as well as contributing to the constitution of self and personhood. These findings confirm that touch works as an existential hinge that affirms a connection between the patient, the body and others and gives a sense of time, space and existence.

Anthropologists and sociologists have paid increasing attention to how states and families entangle in modern societies [...]

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a health challenge in Denmark, especially among young and middle-aged people. It raises questions about control, alienation, responsiveness, and responsibility in relation to the body in welfare societies. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how young and middle-aged Danes diagnosed with IBS inhabit and relate to their bodies. Previous studies have described how IBS patients experience their bodies to be unreliable, unpredictable, and embarrassing. Drawing on phenomenological explorations of bodily alterity, we argue that the gut transforms into "an other" for the afflicted. It is involved in a restless process in which it sometimes emerges as "me," sometimes as "not-me," and sometimes as "not-not-me." People attempt to theorize and control their gut trouble, yet it continuously escapes their grasp. How do people live with and care for such an alienness-within? Does an IBS diagnosis make bodies feel more or less alien?

The exploration of obesity as a phenomenon that runs in families can provide crucial insights into the lived experience of kinship. Based on a longitudinal fieldwork among Danish families, I argue that kinship terms like 'mutuality of being' and 'the mysterious effectiveness of relationality' characterise their lived experience of obesity and family life. Taking my point of departure in previous work on the lived experience of kinship, I draw on Bernhard Waldenfels' responsive phenomenology, specifically his notion of 'originary substitution', which 1. Highlights complex dynamics of sameness and difference and 2. Avoids both individualism and fusion into third-person categories in the exploration of sameness and difference. I argue that dynamics of being 'same-same, but different, but same' and of 'cutting/belonging' become accentuated when something haunts the family. Here, the co-emergence of sameness and difference, and of the nourishing and the poisonous in kinship and relatedness comes to the fore.

In this introduction we conceptualise phenomena that tend to 'run in the family' as contagious kinship connections arguing that experiences of such contagious connections often resemble experiences of haunting. We propose that enigmas about what family is, and what happens in the sociality and practice of kinship and descent, can be understood as forms of social contagion and affective transmission. The empirical contributions of this issue examine what appears if we explore kinship through the analytical lens of contagious connections and vice versa: if we explore contagion in kinship and family. In the introduction we suggest to explore contagious kinship connections through crosscutting questions about WHAT runs in families; HOW 'it' runs; what kinship IS, then; and what people DO about contagious kinship connections.

Hvordan spredes overvægt? Kan man tale om, at noget smitter i overvægtsepidemien? Hvis man kan, hvad er det så, der smitter, og hvilke dynamikker kendetegner sådanne smitteprocesser? Det er nogle af de spørgsmål, jeg har undersøgt i et etnografisk feltarbejde udført blandt overvægtige familier i Danmark i 2001-2003 og i 2014-2015. Jeg undersøger familiernes erfaringer og refleksioner over overvægtsepidemien gennem tre begreber: 1. ’social smitte’ i familie- og slægtskabsrelationer og i den danske hygge, 2. ’kontaminering’ fra sted og tid og 3. ’konfiguration’ som det konkrete felt eller mønster af social smitte, kontaminering og andre forhold, som gør sig gældende i konkrete situationer, familier, tider og steder. Jeg foreslår ligeledes ’affektion’ som et fænomenologisk funderet bud på, hvordan vi kan forstå de kausale dynamikker i social smitte, kontaminering og konfiguration. Affektion er karakteriseret ved intersubjektivitet og ubestemthed frem for den afgrænsede individualitet og lineære kausalitet, der præger både energiubalance-modellen, livsstilsbegrebet samt de fleste interdisciplinære tilgange til overvægt.Kinship, “Hygge”, Time and Place. Family Perspectives on the Obesity Epidemic How does obesity spread? Does it make sense to talk about contagion in relation to the obesity epidemic? If so, what is contagion, and what dynamics characterize the processes of spread? These are some of the questions I explored in an ethnographic fieldwork among overweight families in Denmark in 2001-2003 and 2014-2015. I explore the families’ experiences and reflections in relation to the obesity epidemic through three notions: 1. ‘social contagion’ in family and kinship relations and Danish “hygge”, 2. ‘contamination’ from place and time and 3. ‘configuration’ as the concrete field or pattern of social contagion, contamination and other factors, which are pertinent to concrete situations, persons, families, times and places. In addition, I propose ‘affection’ as a phenomenological take on causal dynamics in social contagion, contamination and configuration. Affection is characterized by intersubjectivity and indeterminacy, contrary to the delineated individuality and a linear causality, which characterize both the energy expenditure model, the notion of lifestyle and most interdisciplinary approaches to obesity.

I 2008 læser den danske filminstruktør Jeppe Rønde i Politiken om en epidemi af selvmord blandt unge i byen Bridgend i Wales. Igennem fem år besøger han byen og kommer tæt på den gruppe af unge, hvori selvmordene foregår, samtidig med at han løbende omsætter denne research til et filmmanuskript. Det er der kommet en rystende barsk og smuk film ud af, som ikke giver lette forklaringer på selvmordsbølgen eller epidemien, men som giver en indsigt i det uforklarlige og processer omkring social smitte, som det opleves af de involverede. Lone Grøn så filmen i foråret 2015 og blev slået af de sammenfald, der var mellem Jeppe Røndes perspektiv på selvmordsepidemien og forsøget på at udvikle en fænomenologi om social smitte, som hun selv og Lotte Meinert var i gang med sammen med forskere fra USC og UCLA, Los Angeles (Meinert og Grøn in press). Dette sammenfald skyldes sandsynligvis Røndes tilgang, der minder om det etnografiske feltarbejde. Gennem fem år fulgte han den gruppe af unge, hvori selvmordene foregik, og han skildrer i filmen begivenhederne solidarisk fra deres perspektiv. Men der er også andre sammenfald mellem de antropologiske pointer, som Meinert og Grøn fremhæver i deres fænomenologiske analyser (ibid) og Jeppe Røndes film. En fællesnævner er ubestemtheden i kausale relationer. Jeppe Rønde afviser både i interviewet og i filmen, at besvare spørgsmålet om hvorfor selvmordene skete med et enkelt svar. Men som i Meinert og Grøns fænomenologi omkring social smitte spiller relationer en central rolle: Familierelationer og venskabsrelationer - både dem, der udleves og definerer os, og dem, der glimrer ved deres fravær – er afgørende i forståelsen af dynamikker omkring udbredelsen af selvmord. Sidst spiller omgivelserne, landskabet, udkantsbeliggenheden en stor rolle i Røndes film. Den måde, hvorpå omgivelser kan sive ind i mennesker og relationer, er noget, som også bliver fremhævet gennem Meinert og Grøns brug af begrebet social kontaminering.Lone Grøn mødte Jeppe Rønde til en samtale for at høre hans egne ord og overvejelser om social smitte. Samtalen kom til at handle om det ubegribelige, om ordenes magt, om at miste sig selv i andre, om landskabet som aktør. Og om vigtigheden af at tale åbent om selvmord. Vi viderebringer her interviewet i en let redigeret form, i håbet om at bibeholde det perspektiv en kunstner kan give på social smitte og for at sætte fingeren på noget af det, som kan være problematisk ved at italesætte sådanne fænomener.

“Moral (and other) laboratories” is a special issue that draws on Cheryl Mattingly’s notion of the “moral laboratory” to explore the uncanny interface between laboratory ethnography and moral anthropology, and to examine the relationship between experience and experiment. We ask whether laboratory work may provoke new insights about experimental practices in other social spaces such as homes, clinics, and neighborhoods, and conversely, whether the study of morality may provoke new insights about laboratory practices as they unfold in the day-to-day interactions between test tubes, animals, apparatuses, scientists, and technicians. The papers in this collection examine issues unique to authors’ individual projects, but as a whole, they share a common theme: moral experimentation—the work of finding different ways of relating—occurs in relation to the suffering of something or someone, or in response to some kind of moral predicament that tests cultural and historically shaped “human values.” The collection as a whole intends to push for the theoretical status of not merely experience itself, but also of possibility, in exploring uncertain border zones of various kinds—between the human and the animal, between codified ethical rules and ordinary ethics, and between “real” and metaphorical laboratories.

We open the special issue by asking: how are groups of people affected by similar conditions, even when these are not biologically contagious? This is linked to broader theoretical and empirical questions of how we are influenced by others and by the specific times and places in which we live. We describe the history and etymology of the concepts of epidemics and contagion and argue that we need to reclaim some of the pre-Hippocratic meanings of these concepts. Importantly, we suggest a postponement, or epoche, of the negative moral judgment of these terms with a view to exploring what actually happens when noncommunicable diseases and conditions spread. We introduce a variety of existing approaches and argue that they have taken us only part of the way in trying to understand social contagion and cultural epidemics. The articles in this issue explore a variety of noncommunicable conditions that have gained global prominence as epidemic problemsdiabetes, obesity, trauma, and autismthrough perspectives and concepts from phenomenological and experience-near traditions. This includes emic ideas of social contagion and contamination, intersubjective units of analysis, causal indeterminacy, as well as diversity and transformation in social contagion.

In this paper, we will present an analysis of the institutional aging process in childhood and old age in contemporary Denmark. We will take as our point of departure Jennifer Johnson-Hanks’s observation that aging should be seen both as an experiential and an institutional process, and we will apply Ingold’s topographical phenomenology and his notions of maps, landscapes and wayfaring to our ethnographic data. Drawing on field work in Danish schools and elder care institutions, we explore aging processes through their spatial organizations and progressions. We sum up by reflecting on the similarities and differences between aging processes in early and late life. We argue that even if the institutional aging process can be seen as a map of the aging landscape – which acts as a powerful construct in experiences and practices of aging – wayfaring through that same landscape takes place between several poles: chronological, biological, social and phenomenological age – and involves considerable creativity and ongoing work and negotiation from both children and elderly.