Doença de Alzheimer e vida religiosa consagrada: uma etnografia de afeto e espanto

Abstract

This study sought to understand how religious life influences the way a group of catholic nuns perceive and live Alzheimer’s disease. The goal was to monitor the multiple ontologies of the disease being built in day-by-day life through the practices, affections and silence in the residence where they live. The appreciation of the after-life and religious path brings their own interpretations of the disease, undoing fears and embracing symptoms. All this within the relation among disease, old age, care, gender and religion. By means of two analytical approaches, namely embodiment and selfhood, I attempt to apprehend how these bodies in the process of dementia perceive the world and undergo the experience with the disease in a religious context and how my own body also shifted in the field. Lastly, I show how images – photographs and drawings –  held a crucial role to gain entrance to the world of dementia and religion in order to see and listen that which the silence did not allow me to find in the beginning.