Cathrine Degnen
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 80337 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Cathrine Degnen |
| PRENOMES | Cathrine |
| SOBRENOME | Degnen |
| ASSINATURA | DEGNEN C |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Newcastle University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7893-8678 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 33 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 185 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 33 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2004 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Building in Possibilities
In this paper, we illustrate how virtual exchanges that are similar to collaborative online international learning (COIL) can function as an effective means for integrating international and experiential training in collaborative-based ethnography across the curriculum, even in courses not specifically designed as research methods. Drawing upon data from three years of surveys and student reflections on their experience of taking part in an inter…
Out of Time
Generation or relative age is a common way humans define social difference. In Europe and North America, old age is frequently perceived as a period of decline and loss, a condition “successful aging” paradigms exhort individuals to avoid for as long as possible. Explicit and implicit ageist beliefs, discourses, and practices marginalize later life, portraying it as undesirable and inferior. This essay explores how imagined generational relations…
It Was Like a Tsunami”
Based on an innovative method of knowledge exchange with two third-sector organizations working with asylum migrants in Newcastle, UK, and Parma, Italy, we examine how each has reoriented what they consider as sanctuary-building work in response to repressive state asylum policies. This includes focusing on language and communication due to increasingly troubling anti-migration discourses that make the once unspeakable now speakable in both count…
Brexit with a little 'b
This article analyses senses of belonging and belonging disrupted via the lens of Brexit with a little 'b': namely at the level of ordinary experiences in the flow of daily lives. Our interlocutors recount these as deeply emotionally charged experiences. Their accounts supplement and help nuance more widespread popular explanatory models of the referendum vote and its outcomes. Examining brexit through the intersection of belonging and emotion pe…
Leavers and Remainers as 'Kinds of People
c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher's website: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2022.2155208
Power, Ontologies and Gendered Resistance in Rural Northwestern Ghana
This article examines diffuse and complex resistance practices that are exercised within the context of exogamous virilocal marriage and its constraints. In particular, we consider the deployment of songs and dissimulation as subversive strategies by women in a Dagaaba settlement in northwestern Ghana. We argue that, despite the constraints of marital violence and gendered subordination associated with exogamous marriage practices, and women's re…
Living the everyday of dementia friendliness
Dementia friendly communities are a priority for international policymaking aimed at tackling the social exclusion of people living with dementia. However, what constitutes a dementia friendly community is not well defined nor understood. In this article, we explore what constitutes the enactment of care in a dementia friendly community, focusing on commercial, leisure public places. Through qualitative interviews with carers in the North East of…
Back to the Future
In this chapter, the author explores intergenerational differences in people&s;s relationships with time and how temporality becomes a marker of social difference and distinction. The author turns to distinctive characteristics of narrative style among my research participants. These are shifting temporal frameworks, &s;irrelevant&s; information and the decoupling of background information from narrative accounts. Ultimately, the decoupling of ba…
Dismantling the Person?
Personhood does not always end with death. This chapter explores cross-cultural variations in the extent to which both the living and the dead are understood to be persons and the agency of the dead themselves in the lives of the living. Under consideration here are how cross-cultural practices of grieving, mourning, disposal of the corpse, and memorialising help to illuminate understandings of personhood. As well as examining how death is often …
Personhood, Birth, Babies, and Children
Focusing on birth and childhood, this chapter shows how personhood is not always granted by virtue of physiological birth; infants and children are often perceived as liminal beings and not fully human persons for some period of time. Explored here are the ways in which the biological and the social are co-constitutive in regard to personhood, and the processual ways in which personhood is attributed and made. As well as looking at naming, feedin…
Older Age and Personhood
In many Western contexts, older age is imagined as a threatening part of the life course whereby personhood might become lost. This chapter investigates why that might be the case, and contrasts these assumptions with other cultural understandings of personhood and later life. Older age is not universally framed around ideas of loss nor is maintaining youthfulness a universal virtue or imperative. Also explored here are the ways in which gender, …
Place and Personhood
Place, this chapter argues, is not just a setting or backdrop for the life course and personhood: it can also be constitutive of them. Via a range of ethnographic examples, this chapter explores how personhood can be made through social interactions and the transmission of substance, grounded and embodied in place. The chapter outlines key theoretical principles on place and its significance as discussed by anthropologists and human geographers. …
Human People and Other-Than-Human People
Personhood is not a status that only human beings have a claim on. Persons can be human, and they can be other than human. Drawing on cross-cultural ethnographic materials, this chapter lays out the history of ideas on personhood in the human and the other than human realms, working through concepts such as animism, reciprocity, perspectivism, and multi-naturalism. The chapter thus highlights and challenges notions of human exceptionalism in norm…
Endangered Forms of Personhood
This chapter reveals the extent to which personhood needs to be worked at, maintained, and protected. It does so by considering examples of the socially and culturally troubling boundaries between life and death, states of being what Degnen calls “endangered personhood”. These include brain death, dementia, and forms of disordered consciousness such as persistent vegetative state. All generate sharp questions around the nature of consciousness, i…
Making Babies and Being Pregnant
This chapter explores cross-cultural variation in understandings of personhood via conception and pregnancy. The significance and meaning of biology and the body are not universally agreed on in regard to these events. Instead, this chapter demonstrates how conception and pregnancy are shaped by multiple social, cultural, and historical factors in ways that inflect (and are inflected by) notions of personhood and when personhood of the unborn mig…
The Making of Personhood
Who and what counts as a person? How do we know? When is personhood attributed? To what extent does place shape personhood? Can personhood be “lost”? Is personhood only for the living or is it a question for the dead too? These are key questions of this monograph, introduced here and set in the broader context of the study of personhood in anthropology. This chapter argues that whilst answers to these questions of personhood vary cross-culturally…
Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Course
Exploring notions of the person through a wide range of anthropological literature, Cathrine Degnen analyses how personhood is built, affirmed, and maintained during various life stages and via multip
Placing Personhood
This article considers the challenge of teaching the anthropology of personhood to third year sociology and combined honours undergraduates at a British university. It draws on the experiences of the author in developing such a module, and in particular the difficulties of making the theoretical and empirical concepts at stake more tangible to this cohort of students. The article explores one solution, namely a seminar-based fieldwork exercise in…
Bringing Britain into being
In this Introduction to the volume, the authors argue that the time is over for thinking reductively of the anthropology of Britain as simply 'anthropology at home'. The authors also argue for the importance of creating space to promote fresh intellectual dialogue between anthropology and sociology. Both sociologists and anthropologists working on aspects of British social life are equally engaged, now more than ever, in the critical investigatio…
Amongst the disciplines
The history of relations between anthropology and sociology in the UK might at best be described as 'studied indifference'. And yet, they have shared disciplinary interests in many respects, including the concepts of belonging and identity. This article resists disciplinary boundaries and 'thinks together' sociological interpretations of intersectionality and anthropological notions of intersection. The authors argue that whilst intersectionality…
When walking becomes wandering
Dementia is linked to behavioural changes that are perceived as challenging to care practices. One such behavioural change is 'wandering', something that is often deeply feared by carers and by people with dementia themselves. Understanding how behavioural changes like wandering are experienced as problematic is critically important in current discussions about the behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia. In this article we draw on our…
Socialising place attachment
The significance of place attachment for later life has been convincingly demonstrated. Scholars have offered useful models that help account for the depth of feeling bound up in place attachment in later life, how this attachment is achieved, and its relevance for belonging and identity. To date, however, this focus has largely been on the individual level of experience. This article draws on sociological and anthropological perspectives to cons…
Knowing', Absence, and Presence
Through the lens of 'knowing', which is simultaneously an expression in colloquial English and a set of cognate practices, this paper considers the ways in which relations come to have ontological depth which is both spatial and temporal. The significance of knowing people and places in everyday life exceeds a simple 'familiarity with' or 'knowledge of'. Instead, knowing speaks to what it is that is said to matter in the webs of relations which c…
European Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology
Ghosts of memory
Relationality, Place, and Absence
This article builds on recent work on memory and place in the social sciences. One emphasis in the literature on 'Western' forms of social memory has been on official, intentional sites of commemoration, such as war memorials and monuments. Based on fieldwork in the north of England with older residents of a former coal mining village, I approach social memory from a different perspective, emphasising the work of memory and its complex interactio…
Socialising place attachment
The significance of place attachment for later life has been convincingly demonstrated. Scholars have offered useful models that help account for the depth of feeling bound up in place attachment in later life, how this attachment is achieved, and its relevance for belonging and identity. To date, however, this focus has largely been on the individual level of experience. This article draws on sociological and anthropological perspectives to cons…
On vegetable love
A dominant model in the West has metaphorically likened the human body to a machine since at least the time of the Enlightenment. Drawing on research in the north of England with gardeners, this article explores a different set of associations. I consider the implications of English gardening practices and knowledge that insist on reciprocal parallels between human bodies and intentionality and those of plants. While humans are not equated with p…
Knowing', Absence, and Presence
Through the lens of 'knowing', which is simultaneously an expression in colloquial English and a set of cognate practices, this paper considers the ways in which relations come to have ontological depth which is both spatial and temporal. The significance of knowing people and places in everyday life exceeds a simple 'familiarity with' or 'knowledge of'. Instead, knowing speaks to what it is that is said to matter in the webs of relations which c…
Minding the gap
Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Course
Exploring notions of the person through a wide range of anthropological literature, Cathrine Degnen analyses how personhood is built, affirmed, and maintained during various life stages and via multip
Amongst the disciplines
The history of relations between anthropology and sociology in the UK might at best be described as 'studied indifference'. And yet, they have shared disciplinary interests in many respects, including the concepts of belonging and identity. This article resists disciplinary boundaries and 'thinks together' sociological interpretations of intersectionality and anthropological notions of intersection. The authors argue that whilst intersectionality…
When walking becomes wandering
Dementia is linked to behavioural changes that are perceived as challenging to care practices. One such behavioural change is 'wandering', something that is often deeply feared by carers and by people with dementia themselves. Understanding how behavioural changes like wandering are experienced as problematic is critically important in current discussions about the behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia. In this article we draw on our…
Leavers and Remainers as 'Kinds of People
c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher's website: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2022.2155208
Living the everyday of dementia friendliness
Dementia friendly communities are a priority for international policymaking aimed at tackling the social exclusion of people living with dementia. However, what constitutes a dementia friendly community is not well defined nor understood. In this article, we explore what constitutes the enactment of care in a dementia friendly community, focusing on commercial, leisure public places. Through qualitative interviews with carers in the North East of…
Bringing Britain into being
In this Introduction to the volume, the authors argue that the time is over for thinking reductively of the anthropology of Britain as simply 'anthropology at home'. The authors also argue for the importance of creating space to promote fresh intellectual dialogue between anthropology and sociology. Both sociologists and anthropologists working on aspects of British social life are equally engaged, now more than ever, in the critical investigatio…
Power, Ontologies and Gendered Resistance in Rural Northwestern Ghana
This article examines diffuse and complex resistance practices that are exercised within the context of exogamous virilocal marriage and its constraints. In particular, we consider the deployment of songs and dissimulation as subversive strategies by women in a Dagaaba settlement in northwestern Ghana. We argue that, despite the constraints of marital violence and gendered subordination associated with exogamous marriage practices, and women's re…
Brexit with a little 'b
This article analyses senses of belonging and belonging disrupted via the lens of Brexit with a little 'b': namely at the level of ordinary experiences in the flow of daily lives. Our interlocutors recount these as deeply emotionally charged experiences. Their accounts supplement and help nuance more widespread popular explanatory models of the referendum vote and its outcomes. Examining brexit through the intersection of belonging and emotion pe…
Mémoire des lieux et lien social à Dodworth
S'appuyant sur une enquête de terrain menée dans le nord de l'Angleterre auprès des habitants les plus âgés d'un ancien village minier, l'auteur explore le travail complexe qu'effectue la mémoire lorsqu'elle articule espace et lien social. Sa recherche montre à quel point savoirs locaux et rapports sociaux sont imbriqués dans la topographie locale, et c'est à travers ce qu'elle appelle le « caractère tridimensionnel de la mémoire » qu'elle étudie…
Softly, softly
Since the late 1990s genetically modified foods, crops, and products have provoked a great deal of controversy in Britain. This article does not challenge the presence of debate over genetic modification in Britain, but rather calls attention to public silences on genetic modification that have often been overlooked. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork in two parts of the north of England, I explore the ways in which these silences were not equally …
British Subjects
Relationality, Place, and Absence
This article builds on recent work on memory and place in the social sciences. One emphasis in the literature on 'Western' forms of social memory has been on official, intentional sites of commemoration, such as war memorials and monuments. Based on fieldwork in the north of England with older residents of a former coal mining village, I approach social memory from a different perspective, emphasising the work of memory and its complex interactio…
Animals and Science
Minding the gap
Softly, softly
Since the late 1990s genetically modified foods, crops, and products have provoked a great deal of controversy in Britain. This article does not challenge the presence of debate over genetic modification in Britain, but rather calls attention to public silences on genetic modification that have often been overlooked. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork in two parts of the north of England, I explore the ways in which these silences were not equally …
Mémoire des lieux et lien social à Dodworth
S'appuyant sur une enquête de terrain menée dans le nord de l'Angleterre auprès des habitants les plus âgés d'un ancien village minier, l'auteur explore le travail complexe qu'effectue la mémoire lorsqu'elle articule espace et lien social. Sa recherche montre à quel point savoirs locaux et rapports sociaux sont imbriqués dans la topographie locale, et c'est à travers ce qu'elle appelle le « caractère tridimensionnel de la mémoire » qu'elle étudie…
We have something in common
European Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology
Ghosts of memory
On vegetable love
A dominant model in the West has metaphorically likened the human body to a machine since at least the time of the Enlightenment. Drawing on research in the north of England with gardeners, this article explores a different set of associations. I consider the implications of English gardening practices and knowledge that insist on reciprocal parallels between human bodies and intentionality and those of plants. While humans are not equated with p…
Knowing', Absence, and Presence
Through the lens of 'knowing', which is simultaneously an expression in colloquial English and a set of cognate practices, this paper considers the ways in which relations come to have ontological depth which is both spatial and temporal. The significance of knowing people and places in everyday life exceeds a simple 'familiarity with' or 'knowledge of'. Instead, knowing speaks to what it is that is said to matter in the webs of relations which c…
Socialising place attachment
The significance of place attachment for later life has been convincingly demonstrated. Scholars have offered useful models that help account for the depth of feeling bound up in place attachment in later life, how this attachment is achieved, and its relevance for belonging and identity. To date, however, this focus has largely been on the individual level of experience. This article draws on sociological and anthropological perspectives to cons…
Placing Personhood
This article considers the challenge of teaching the anthropology of personhood to third year sociology and combined honours undergraduates at a British university. It draws on the experiences of the author in developing such a module, and in particular the difficulties of making the theoretical and empirical concepts at stake more tangible to this cohort of students. The article explores one solution, namely a seminar-based fieldwork exercise in…
Bringing Britain into being
In this Introduction to the volume, the authors argue that the time is over for thinking reductively of the anthropology of Britain as simply 'anthropology at home'. The authors also argue for the importance of creating space to promote fresh intellectual dialogue between anthropology and sociology. Both sociologists and anthropologists working on aspects of British social life are equally engaged, now more than ever, in the critical investigatio…
Amongst the disciplines
The history of relations between anthropology and sociology in the UK might at best be described as 'studied indifference'. And yet, they have shared disciplinary interests in many respects, including the concepts of belonging and identity. This article resists disciplinary boundaries and 'thinks together' sociological interpretations of intersectionality and anthropological notions of intersection. The authors argue that whilst intersectionality…
When walking becomes wandering
Dementia is linked to behavioural changes that are perceived as challenging to care practices. One such behavioural change is 'wandering', something that is often deeply feared by carers and by people with dementia themselves. Understanding how behavioural changes like wandering are experienced as problematic is critically important in current discussions about the behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia. In this article we draw on our…
Dismantling the Person?
Personhood does not always end with death. This chapter explores cross-cultural variations in the extent to which both the living and the dead are understood to be persons and the agency of the dead themselves in the lives of the living. Under consideration here are how cross-cultural practices of grieving, mourning, disposal of the corpse, and memorialising help to illuminate understandings of personhood. As well as examining how death is often …
Personhood, Birth, Babies, and Children
Focusing on birth and childhood, this chapter shows how personhood is not always granted by virtue of physiological birth; infants and children are often perceived as liminal beings and not fully human persons for some period of time. Explored here are the ways in which the biological and the social are co-constitutive in regard to personhood, and the processual ways in which personhood is attributed and made. As well as looking at naming, feedin…
Older Age and Personhood
In many Western contexts, older age is imagined as a threatening part of the life course whereby personhood might become lost. This chapter investigates why that might be the case, and contrasts these assumptions with other cultural understandings of personhood and later life. Older age is not universally framed around ideas of loss nor is maintaining youthfulness a universal virtue or imperative. Also explored here are the ways in which gender, …
Place and Personhood
Place, this chapter argues, is not just a setting or backdrop for the life course and personhood: it can also be constitutive of them. Via a range of ethnographic examples, this chapter explores how personhood can be made through social interactions and the transmission of substance, grounded and embodied in place. The chapter outlines key theoretical principles on place and its significance as discussed by anthropologists and human geographers. …
Human People and Other-Than-Human People
Personhood is not a status that only human beings have a claim on. Persons can be human, and they can be other than human. Drawing on cross-cultural ethnographic materials, this chapter lays out the history of ideas on personhood in the human and the other than human realms, working through concepts such as animism, reciprocity, perspectivism, and multi-naturalism. The chapter thus highlights and challenges notions of human exceptionalism in norm…
Endangered Forms of Personhood
This chapter reveals the extent to which personhood needs to be worked at, maintained, and protected. It does so by considering examples of the socially and culturally troubling boundaries between life and death, states of being what Degnen calls “endangered personhood”. These include brain death, dementia, and forms of disordered consciousness such as persistent vegetative state. All generate sharp questions around the nature of consciousness, i…
Making Babies and Being Pregnant
This chapter explores cross-cultural variation in understandings of personhood via conception and pregnancy. The significance and meaning of biology and the body are not universally agreed on in regard to these events. Instead, this chapter demonstrates how conception and pregnancy are shaped by multiple social, cultural, and historical factors in ways that inflect (and are inflected by) notions of personhood and when personhood of the unborn mig…
The Making of Personhood
Who and what counts as a person? How do we know? When is personhood attributed? To what extent does place shape personhood? Can personhood be “lost”? Is personhood only for the living or is it a question for the dead too? These are key questions of this monograph, introduced here and set in the broader context of the study of personhood in anthropology. This chapter argues that whilst answers to these questions of personhood vary cross-culturally…
Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Course
Exploring notions of the person through a wide range of anthropological literature, Cathrine Degnen analyses how personhood is built, affirmed, and maintained during various life stages and via multip
Sociology (27 obras) · Epistemology (16 obras) · Anthropology (13 obras) · Philosophy (12 obras) · Psychology (11 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (10 obras) · Ethnography (10 obras) · Personhood (10 obras) · History (9 obras) · Art (6 obras)