Enabling Dwelling: Caregiving and Familiar Object Interactions amidst Cognitive Decline in Rural South Africa

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/aa.2025.544

Keywords:

Aging in Place, Dementia, Home-based Care, Materiality

Abstract

As people experience cognitive decline, they make and remake their identities in practice, including through interactions with everyday objects. Facilitating object interactions thus becomes an act of care. We present ethnographic data detailing how two women with cognitive decline, who were receiving informal home-based care in a rural area of South Africa, shaped and expressed their identities by dwelling — using objects to enact practices through which they formed binding relationships— and how dwelling built on and shaped their identities and relationships. Both women interacted with objects related to domestic and agricultural work — homegrown fruit, water, firewood, brooms — in ways that reflected their cultural, class and gender identities as homemakers and through which they made their homes homely. The women navigated domestic spaces with a familiarity that revealed their sense of belonging. Yet caregivers sometimes restricted their access to objects that facilitated mental health promoting practices, due to scarcity. We suggest a need to understand the social benefits of “aging in place” (at home) in relation to the opportunities that places — potentially extending to institutional care facilities — afford for dwelling. Narratives advocating aging in place must acknowledge the cultural and personal continuity, as well as the material deprivations and related restrictions, that aging at home in precarious circumstances entails, for people with cognitive decline and for their caregivers.

Author Biographies

Michelle Brear, University of the Witwatersrand, School of Public Health

Michelle Brear is a Senior Researcher in the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand. Her research focuses on the social and material determinants of health in southern African communities.

Themby Nkovana, Wits Rural Health and Health Transitions Research Unit

Themby Nkovana is a qualitative field worker at the Wits Rural Health and Health Transitions Research Unit and a specialist in frontline research work, including participant recruitment and engagement, data collection and Xitsonga-English translation.

Lenore Manderson, University of the Witwatersrand, School of Public Health

Lenore Manderson is Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology in the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand. Her research, primarily in Southeast Asia, Australia and South Africa, focuses on inequality and social justice in relation to health and the environment.

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Published

2025-07-08 — Updated on 2025-07-11

Issue

Vol. 46 No. 1 (2025)

Section

Articles

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Copyright (c) 2025 Michelle Brear, Themby Nkovana, Lenore Manderson

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