Subjecthood matters: Autoethnography of caring for father with dementia under rural constraints
Oct 22 2025Rogozin D. М. Subjecthood matters: Autoethnography of caring for father with dementia under rural constraints // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2025. V.10. №3. P. 289-305.
EDN: PTBHWG
Annotation
The article presents a deeply personal and scientifically grounded analysis of caring for an aging parent with progressive dementia in rural Russia. Based on the experience of caring for his father in the town of Abaza (Khakassia), the author shows the complex interplay of administrative, social and cultural factors that determine the quality of palliative and long-term care in rural areas. Although Abaza has a city status, it is rather a rural settlement with a shortage of medical and social resources, close community ties, widespread subsistence farming, and weak institutional support. The author describes how these “rural constraints” both complicate caring and develop a specific care culture in which professional assistance often turns into the formal performance of duties, ignoring the patient’s subjecthood. Under the crisis caused by his father’s deteriorating condition, the author shows how a return to a person-centered approach (negotiated actions, respected individuality and emotional engagement) can restore the patient’s speech, mobility, and dignity. The author emphasizes that dementia does not eliminate subjecthood but demands to rethink care practices. The article calls for a paradigm shift: from efficiency and bureaucratic regulation toward reflexivity, ethics of care and recognition of the elder as full-fledged subjects, regardless of cognitive impairment or geographical location.
Keywords
Autoethnography, dementia, long-term care, rural constraints, social isolation, sociology of aging, subjecthood, person-centered approach, ethics of care.
About the author
Dmitry М. Rogozin, PhD (Sociology), Head of the Field Research Laboratory, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. Prechistenskaya Nab., 11, bldg. 1, Moscow, 119034, Russia.
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Additional Info
- Submitted Wednesday, 23 July 2025
- Reviewed Friday, 15 August 2025
- Copyright © Auhtors, 2025
- Distribution Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Rogozin D.M., Vyugovskaya E.V. Autoethnography of the rural house in the Russian North // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2019. V.4. №1. P. 98-122.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2019-4-1-98-122
Annotation
The authors use the ethnographic weak description, i.e. the introspection of personal feelings and impressions, to turn personal reflections into a complete story supplemented with the fragments of narrators’ direct speech and linguistic means that allow to express emotions in words and phrases; thus, the authors reconstruct the concept of the Russian northern rural house and archetypical representations of the traditional rural lifestyle. The article is based on conversations and observations in Siniki, the village in the Ustyansky district of the Arkhangelsk Region, in which the structure of respondents’ houses, their appearances, history of construction and of families were discussed. The distinctive features of the old northern house are determined not only by its architectural forms, organization of everyday-life space (hut) and farm outbuildings but also by its owners’ biographies and destinies for the house reflects cultural identities, family values and memories, and intergenerational connections. The internal structure of the house determined primarily by natural conditions, economic needs and pragmatics of everyday life allows to identify four types of northern rural houses: a hut, a five-wall house, a no-name house and a duplex house. The latter two types represent the most recent housing characterized by functionality, comfort, compactness and the loss of the previously important wide economic multifunctional spaces. Today the new forms of management and organization of the living place and transformations of the rural house by the contemporary villagers (mainly the elderly) are the basis of the rural revival.
Keywords
autoethnography, participant observation, rural house, rural revival, weak description, rural lifestyle
About the authors
Dmitry М. Rogozin, PhD (Sociology), Head of the Laboratory for Social Research Methodology, Institute of Social Analysis and Forecasting, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. 119034, Moscow, nab. Prechistenskaya, 1.
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Elena V. Vyugovskaya, Researcher, Laboratory for Social Research Methodology, Institute of Social Analysis and Forecasting, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. 119034, Moscow, nab. Prechistenskaya, 1.
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