TY - JOUR

T1 - Temporal Belonging

T2 - Loss of Time and Fragile Attempts to Belong with Alzheimer’s Disease

AU - Glavind, Ida Marie Lind

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - Building on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork among people with Alzheimer’s disease living in Denmark, I argue that the loss of a sense of time caused by Alzheimer’s is not a subjective loss, but rather an intersubjective one. Alzheimer’s disease entails living with desynchronized rhythms, time that can be made painfully explicit, and numbers becoming increasingly tricky to manage. Drawing on Thomas Fuchs’ theory of how individuals live in ‘‘basic contemporality,’’ I explore moments of temporal rupture, and how people with Alzheimer’s challenge their social relations due to their different sense of time. The article contributes to ongoing discussions about belonging. Taking inspiration from Tine Gammeltoft’s description of how belonging entails fragile attempts at being part of something larger, and is thus a joint social practice, I show how one dimension of belonging’s fragility is the inability to be in synch with social time. By proposing the notion of temporal belonging, I suggest that sustaining a sense of belonging is also about being able to participate in the rhythms and tempo of social life.

AB - Building on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork among people with Alzheimer’s disease living in Denmark, I argue that the loss of a sense of time caused by Alzheimer’s is not a subjective loss, but rather an intersubjective one. Alzheimer’s disease entails living with desynchronized rhythms, time that can be made painfully explicit, and numbers becoming increasingly tricky to manage. Drawing on Thomas Fuchs’ theory of how individuals live in ‘‘basic contemporality,’’ I explore moments of temporal rupture, and how people with Alzheimer’s challenge their social relations due to their different sense of time. The article contributes to ongoing discussions about belonging. Taking inspiration from Tine Gammeltoft’s description of how belonging entails fragile attempts at being part of something larger, and is thus a joint social practice, I show how one dimension of belonging’s fragility is the inability to be in synch with social time. By proposing the notion of temporal belonging, I suggest that sustaining a sense of belonging is also about being able to participate in the rhythms and tempo of social life.

KW - Faculty of Social Sciences

KW - Alzheimer’s disease

KW - Dementia

KW - Belonging

KW - Temporality

U2 - 10.1007/s11013-022-09803-3

DO - 10.1007/s11013-022-09803-3

M3 - Journal article

C2 - 35882739

VL - 47

SP - 834

EP - 856

JO - Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry

JF - Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry

SN - 0165-005X

ER -