Within fabulous islands: ethnography, autism and dementia in relation

Abstract

From a heterogeneous set of materials (autobiographical accounts, texts and reflections produced by autistics and people with dementia, scenes and conversations in field research, images), this article maps relations between expressive forms of the ways of seeing, showing and writing neurological-mental-cognitive dementia and neurodivergent processes as experiences that open possibilities for thinking language, person, body, mind, world. The materials that transition from pre-verbal to verbal highlight tensions of ethnographic doing and writing. Truncated speech, scrambled and missing words, word-images, silent body movements bring methodological, epistemological, ontological, and ethical challenges. We highlight moments when autistics and people with dementia tell us about a world-other and we conceptually explore the experience of the in-between to stay at the “threshold of understanding”. We trace “lines of escape” or “of wandering” and then overflow autism and dementia from biomedicine to other directions: from pathology to pathos, from symptom to experience and to another possible world.

Keywords:
ethnography; autism; dementia; language