1 - Introduction

Summary

This chapter provides an introduction to the book’s subject matter and an initial sense of its ‘worldly’ orientation and themes. Some common spheres in which dignity is important are surveyed (end-of-life arrangements and funerals, access to sanitation and hygiene products, practices of health and social care, relations in the workplace, etc.), leading to the postulation of three general points: dignity is performative, embodied and ineliminably relational; dignity is emergent – a process, and not simply a quality, attribute or state of being; dignity is political, in that it is enmeshed with the wider conditions affecting economy, society and culture.