Intangible Cultural Heritage: 'Curating' the Human

‘Nostalgic environments’ are increasingly being created in museums and institutional care settings for people with dementia, to support residents’ capacities for memory and recognition. Drawing upon ethnography carried out in a public nursing home specialized in dementia care in Copenhagen, Denmark, this paper engages conceptually the employment of material heritage within dementia care environments, proposing dementia care as a ‘curatorial’ practice: caregivers act as ‘curators’ who re-establish and reorganize the ‘meaning’ of the residents by preserving their individual biographies and societal belonging. The analytical alignment of dementia care with the curating of cultural valuables reveals that the human is not only the subject within—and the creator of—cultural heritage, but also the object: the person with dementia is simultaneously an acting subject in care and an object for performances of the category of the human. As the curatorial care performed in nursing homes preserves not only individual, but also collective memories of what it takes to be human and belong in society, these institutions should be recognized as significant sites within society concerned with the production of meaning, value and cultural heritage