Still in the Danwei: How Danwei Memory Anchors Institutional Dementia Care in Urban China

ABSTRACT Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an urban Chinese care home, this article examines how residents with dementia establish familiarity in institutional settings. Contrary to home-making approaches that locate familiarity in domestic intimacy, residents reorient themselves through collective embeddedness. Engaging with routines, material arrangements, and social interactions, they reinterpret the care home through the danwei—the socialist work unit that once organized labor and welfare. This resonance activates embodied experiences of familarity and security rooted in the socialist state. The article shows that familiarity in dementia care may emerge not only from home but from collective institutional worlds that structured earlier life.