Co-edited by Jennifer Selby and Paul Bramadat

Introduction to Ellen Badone’s Festschrift: She Listened, We Listened

By Paul Bramadat, CSRS, University of Victoria

“It’s like a spa for intellectuals,” a colleague said to me by way of an orientation in 2008 when I assumed my role as director at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria. I was not quite sure what she meant by this back then, but now it makes more sense. People at the CSRS are there from abroad during their sabbaticals, or they are UVic faculty who have won a course-buy out for half a year, or they are graduate students (or artists) who have won a fellowship that brings them into our orbit. So, everyone is in a liminal state – betwixt and between, and usually quite buoyant. The relatively uncluttered schedule they suddenly have, and our ethos, allow them to relax, focus on their writing, and build bridges with people in other fields. They also tell stories from the non-spa period of their lives. They tell the kinds of tales of academic life that would make any eavesdropper decide to do almost anything other than set their sights on a scholarly career.

The most depressing and distressing stories I hear at the CSRS are from graduate students whose supervisors consider them to be a nuisance, either because the student is working on a topic far removed from the mentor’s interests, or because they are working on the supervisor’s topic, but in a new way. Of course, our peers and students also talk about the often-crushing experience of applying for jobs or living in a hostile department. We all know that there are good stories to tell, too, but the terrible ones draw a lot of attention because the other dozen or two CSRS fellows in residence work hard to support one another.

In this collection, my colleague Jenn Selby and I have brought together former graduate students of Ellen Badone of McMaster University (cross-appointed in the Religious Studies and Anthropology departments) to reflect on what they, or we, have learned from her. The contributors – Jeremy Cohen, Paula Holmes-Rodman, Hisako Omori, Angela Robinson, Jenn Selby, and I – offer reflections on her impact on our intellectual and personal lives. Of course, these are good news stories, and they echo my own experiences with her from 1993-1997 when I was a doctoral student at McMaster. These are not just the stories of her fans – as one author points out, these reflections indicate a broader positive narrative around Ellen in the fields in which she was so well moored. Moreover, these are not really just stories about Ellen. These are stories about what it means to study religion when one takes the broadest possible view of reflexivity – a view that includes oneself, one’s topic, one’s peers, one’s students, and one’s interlocutors.

Perhaps it should go without saying, but I will say it anyway: the contributors to this special issue are appropriately appreciative of her scholarship. One gets a clear sense of the breadth of her curiosity by reading her publication list, and by following the research interests of her PhD students. One of the things I learned from her – perhaps without her ever saying this out loud – was that I should only ask questions that genuinely interested me. Of course there is inherent worth in “filling gaps in the literature,” but too few of us actually ask ourselves whether perhaps the gap is there because the work needed to fill it is out of proportion to what we learn in the process. So, Ellen is a formidable scholar in the conventional sense, but in my view her capacity to see, and to help us clarify through speech and text, what is actually interesting in our work, is what has made her a model for my subsequent research and approaches to graduate students.

What these essays convey most powerfully, for me, is the gift she gave all of us, alongside of fixing our purple prose or our mangled logic. All of the contributors here have something – more or less the same thing – to say about Ellen as a kind, patient, humble, inquisitive person. I cannot imagine a better writing coach, reference letter writer, or tour guide through the vast continent that is the social scientific study of religion. Before my first interview she created a context in which I could give a mock job-talk, and she arranged for interviews with a chair and a dean, so I could understand the questions that would come from people playing those roles. Beyond that, she also asked what I was planning to wear (because like a good anthropologist she understood these interactions to be theatre, of course, and one needs the right costume, not just the right script). However, most important, she listened to me reflect on my mixed feelings – I was in my 20s, so I had so many feelings! – about my dissertation, job options, peers, and teaching opportunities. She saw something to be tended in all of us, and in all of our dissertations, as well.

As these contributors tells their stories about her impact on their lives, their careers, and the research they conducted under her supervision (and after), I hope readers can intuit the kind of success that is impossible to itemize on an annual report. It is a happy coincidence that the theme of this issue is sedimented histories, vital trajectories, since one can see not just in her writings but in her teaching, a deep attention to the layers and often the ossifications of the cultures we build together. Similarly, one can see in her careful teasing apart of these histories (in Brittany, for example) and in her careful attention to her students’ ambitions, a strong sense that the future need not be the prisoner of the past.

Throughout her career she emphasized subtle observations of human interactions, a curiosity about the tension between formal and lived religiosity, conscientious relationships with participants, a critical suspicion about one’s impact on the fieldwork context, and an openness to a range of methods, theories, and career trajectories. When one considers the ways these themes appear in the lives, careers, teaching, and publications of the contributors assembled here, it is clear that we were listening, too.

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Ellen with Paul Bramadat on the occasion of his PhD defence in 1997

Epistemic Explorations, or the Value of Intellectual Curiosity

By Jeremy Cohen, McMaster University

Academics are expected to write and publish, perform public scholarship, read, review, sit on committees, supervise students, and sometimes teach outside our areas of expertise. Outside of these practical demands, academics are explicitly and implicitly encouraged to specialize and intellectually focus their research. In other words, we are taught to be a master of one rather than a master of none. If we venture past where most stop when quoting Shakespeare, we find the immortal bard writing that “a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one” (emphasis mine). I want to suggest that Ellen’s career is evidence for the benefits of intellectual curiosity, and that to be curious makes one an epistemological explorer. Intellectual curiosity is one of the positive possibilities that can come when standard measures of academic success are broadened. In what follows, I reflect on my experience as Ellen Badone’s last PhD in Religious Studies, and on Ellen’s vast canon, to illustrate the effects of her intellectual curiosity on my own academic trajectory.

I met Ellen while visiting the McMaster University campus in Hamilton, Ontario in 2016. Over coffee, she listened with genuine care and attention as I proposed a continuation of my MA research on online memorialization. After joining the department, Ellen quickly talked me out of that topic, which I came to realize was a sign that joining the McMaster Religious Studies Department was the right choice. Instead of continuing my previous research, Ellen pushed me towards a topic that was familiar to me—transhumanism—but was relatively new to her. How much guidance could I expect from my supervisor if they are not an expert in the study of transhumanism and human augmentation? As I describe below, Ellen’s lack of familiarity with my proposed research agenda spoke to a willingness to push against the boundaries of her knowledge. The willingness to learn, to get lost within new epistemic spaces, is a lesson with consequences that I carry with me today.

Intellectual Curiosity

Ellen’s dissertation, completed in 1988, focused on changing responses to death in Brittany, as did a journal article published that same year, and her monograph, The Appointed Hour: Death, Worldview, and Social Change in Brittany (1989). Ellen has published on topics such as ethnicity and identity (1987); the occult (1987/1995); the ongoing tension between popular and official religion in Europe (1990); reflexivity in the practice of ethnography (1991); the anthropology of pilgrimage and tourism (2004); relationships between biomedicine and alternative therapies (2008); the effects of the da Vinci Code on pilgrimage sites (2008); the effects of Eat, Pray, Love on Euro-American travel (2016); illness narratives and the anthropology of autism (2016); after-death communication and the paranormal (2018); the devasting effects of COVID on long-term care families and practitioners (2021); and neutron activation analyses of fossils found in the northern Yukon Territory (ok, this last example might be from a different “E. Badone”). The entanglements between Ellen’s work make her mastery of her two disciplines obvious, yet the breadth of topics are examples of epistemic curiosity, or the “individual differences in seeking out opportunities for intellectual engagement, acquiring fa89cts and knowledge, or simply the “drive to know” (Berlyne 1954:187). This is to say nothing of the breadth of work produced by Ellen’s students.

I recently spoke with an American MA student in anthropology who is struggling to find a supervisor for their PhD. Their topic is interesting, novel, and engages with contemporary scholarship around Western techno-cultures. Prospective supervisors, however, are often interested in taking on students whose potential projects directly relate to their own research agendas. The issue is not that the student in question would not deviate from their initial topic; rather, supervisors who are qualified to supervise this project have refused to accept a student whose interests do not strictly align with their own. I thought back to Ellen’s students, who have defended dissertations on topics ranging from prison hospice care, transhumanism, Spiritualism, Indigenous religions in Eastern Canada, Death Café culture, nationality and identity, and a lot more. As with Ellen’s own work, the disciplinary entanglements between these projects are clear, and reflects Ellen’s broad yet specialized knowledge base. However, such a diversity of research topics says a lot about a supervisor’s willingness to push against the boundaries of their knowledge and learn alongside their students.

We are all likely familiar with that tenured research professor who publishes the same book or edited volume year after year, their entire career revolving around their mastery of one topic. I once assumed that the mastery of one topic was the ultimate sign of intelligence and aspired to become this professor. Ellen helped me dispel this notion. She influenced my thinking related to the anthropology of religion through the importance of diversification, and the value of curiosity in seeking answers to our multifaceted questions. As Ellen (2004:182) writes in a chapter in her co-edited volume, Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, ethnography is a “pattern of movement to and from unmarked and marked spaces imbued with significance.” The “there” that we travel to is as much about making genuinely new contributions to the world of knowledge as it is about our own self-transformation and recreation—the re-creation of the self in this context. In a practical sense, I am hardwired, and have been most of my life, to seek out that which is new and interesting. That which seizes my attention releases dopamine into my dopamine-starved brain. While the search for new, shiny objects is often a source of shame and guilt for those with ADHD, academia has become a healthy outlet for me. Being a jack of all trades serves me well in my position as an Assistant Professor with a full teaching load, as I must balance any number of subjects, familiar and unfamiliar, from a range of disciplines. Ellen’s body of work, and her guidance as a supervisor, gives me confidence that the answers to our questions can come from varied sources, methodologies, and theories, and that getting lost along the way is crucial to the production and dissemination of new knowledge.

Institutional Curiosity

I end this essay by reflecting on the institutional limits of curiosity. The standard by which students are admitted to graduate programs is typically based on academic performance, which acts as the gatekeeper to institutions of higher education (Stumm et al. 2011:574). Yet, how much consideration is given to how performance is judged, and what might be missed when other learning factors are ignored? Does a GPA reflect the quality and diversity of one’s epistemological questions, or the potential to learn the methods to answer them? I certainly would not be writing these words today if the answer were no. As Stumm et al. argue, intellectual curiosity is a form of agency subsumed by notions of intelligence and effort. Curiosity is critical for the development of knowledge, but in an adverse learning climate, if one even makes it past the gates to higher-education, curiosity can be neutered.

My path to the PhD was far from typical. For neurodiverse students, ADHD and societal responses to their ADHD, often obscures their intellectual curiosity behind poor grades, low self-esteem, and self-doubt—attributes and emotions that may be familiar to anyone who experiences graduate school. I struggled throughout high school, and I only came into my own towards the end of my undergraduate degree in religious studies. It was through religious studies and anthropology that I found ways of seeing the world as a wonderful, exciting, weird, awful, oppressive, extraordinary place, filled with mysteries waiting to be unlocked (or scribbled in notebooks and meticulously described in academic journals). Ideally, the “freedom to explore and experiment with different perspectives is what makes undertaking a PhD so special.” (Dunn et al. 2008:161). The right learning environment nurtured my long-standing desire to understand why people believe the things they do. I remain grateful for the professors—Ellen included—who saw past my transcripts and allowed me to get lost within new epistemic spaces. Others are never given the opportunity to explore the limits of their curiosity.

Conclusion

Early on as a graduate student at McMaster University, I realised the impact that Ellen has had in the fields of religious studies and anthropology. Whether at the meetings for the American Anthropological Association, American Academy of Religion, or the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, I cannot recall any instance where the mention of Ellen did not result in someone saying “Ellen Badone? We love Ellen! You are lucky to have her as a supervisor.” Within our ivory tower, Ellen’s name is academic currency. There is a lot to write about Ellen’s attributes as a researcher, supervisor, and colleague. Ellen has taught me to be a better writer, a better ethnographer, a more compassionate critic, and a better educator. These are qualities that Ellen both embodies and encourages in her students. I hope I can both embody and cultivate similar qualities in my own students, and help them resist the personal, intellectual, and institutional limits placed on their curiosity.

References

Badone, Ellen (1987). Death omens in a Breton memorate. Folklore 98 (1), pp. 99-104. DOI: 10.1080/0015587X.1987.9716401

Badone, Ellen (1988). Changing Breton responses to death. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 18 (1), pp. 77-83. DOI: 10.2190/8TCJ-EBWW-4LUK-Y8W1

Badone, Ellen (1989). The Appointed Hour: Death, Worldview, and Social Change in Brittany. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Badone, Ellen (1990). Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Badone, Ellen (1991). Ethnography, fiction, and the meanings of the past in Brittany. American Ethnologist 18 (3), pp. 518-45. DOI: 10.1525/ae.1991.18.3.02a00060

Badone, Ellen (1995). Suspending disbelief: An encounter with the occult in Brittany. Anthropology and Humanism 20 (1), pp. 9-14. DOI: 10.1525/ahu.1995.20.1.9

Badone, Ellen., and Sharon R. Roseman (eds.) (2004). Intersecting Journeys the Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Badone, Ellen (2008). Illness, biomedicine, and alternative healing in Brittany, France. Medical Anthropology 27 (2), pp. 190-218. DOI: 10.1080/01459740802017439

Badone, Ellen (2008). Pilgrimage, tourism and The Da Vinci Code at Les-Saintes-Maries-De-La-Mer, France. Culture and Religion 9 (1), pp. 23-44. DOI: 10.1080/14755610801954847

Badone, Ellen, David Nicholas, Wendy Roberts, and Peter Kien (2016). Asperger’s syndrome, subjectivity and the senses. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 40 (3), pp. 475-506. DOI: 10.1007/s11013-016-9484-9

Badone, Ellen (2016). Eat, Pray, Love and tourism imaginaries. In: L. Beaman and S. Sikka (eds.), Constructions of Self and Other in Yoga, Travel, and Tourism, pp. 37-43. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Badone, Ellen (2018). After‐death communications. In: A, C. G. M Robben (ed.), A Companion to the Anthropology of Death, pp 293-305. Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Badone, Ellen (2021). From cruddiness to catastrophe: COVID-19 and long-term care in Ontario. Medical Anthropology 40 (5), pp. 389-403. DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2021.1927023

Char, René (2010)[1962]. XXII. In: M.A. Caws and N. Kline (trans.), Furor and Mystery and Other Writings, pp. 115. Paris: Gallimard.

Dunn, Michael C, Zeynep Gurtin-Broadbent, Jessica R Wheeler, and Jonathan Ives (2008). Jack of all trades, master of none? Challenges facing junior academic researchers in bioethics. Clinical Ethics 3 (4), pp. 160-63. DOI: 10.1258/ce.2008.008035

Sophie von Stumm, Benedikt Hell, and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (2011). The hungry mind: Intellectual curiosity is the third pillar of academic performance. Perspectives on Psychological Science 6 (6), pp. 574-88. DOI : 10.1177/1745691611421204

Spooner, Marc (2020). COVID-19 reveals the folly of performance-based funding for universities. The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/covid-19-reveals-the-folly-of-performance-based-funding-for-universities-138575. Retrieved on September 13th, 2022.

Rancourt, Derrick E (2020). Graduates need to prioritize versatility when entering the workforce. University Affairs, https://www.universityaffairs.ca/career-advice/career-advice-article/graduates-need-to-prioritize-versatility-

when-entering-the-workforce/. Retrieved on September 20th, 2022. 

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Enacting Wellness: Autism, Cancer, and the Landscape of “Normal”

By Paula Holmes-Rodman, PhD

Introduction

This reflection is based on ethnographic interviews with my older sister Lindsey, an ovarian cancer survivor and an adult with autism. After Lindsey’s cancer diagnosis in 2019, I became her primary support person, or proxy, and in that role I engaged in three years of autoethnographic “fieldwork.” Interviewing Lindsey began, in part, as a response to finding a dearth of resources available to support ovarian cancer patients on the autism spectrum. She and I are now consulting with Ovarian Cancer Canada in the creation of their new, more inclusive resource guides, and have co-authored a “Dream On” list of how ovarian cancer care could be improved for women on the spectrum.

Ellen Badone inspired my efforts to tell Lindsey’s story in a way that goes beyond autism and ovarian cancer, beyond symptoms and surgery, beyond doctors, patients and proxies.

Badone’s article, Asperger’s syndrome, subjectivity and the senses, is at once illness narrative, autistic autobiography, and social commentary. I seek to build on certain ideas in Badone’s work, especially her call for grounded subjective accounts of autistic experiences, told collaboratively, with a keen awareness of its entangled ethnographic eye and authorial voice.

For Badone, the “illness” in Peter’s illness narrative is autism. In my telling of Lindsey’s illness narrative, the “illness” is ovarian cancer. Lindsey’s autism plays the role of a deeply defined and defining background.  I focus on how a crisis of the physical body, such as the experience of ovarian cancer, throws into both disarray and sharp relief all the ways in which an autistic person understands her world.

A narrative approach to medicine is a welcome home here in so far as it foregrounds the immediacy of the patient’s voice and embraces an experiential embodied focus, as well as explore how the relational context in which all stories about illness are told are important to telling their “truth.” In considering the multiple themes of “enacted wellness” in Lindsey’s illness narrative, I see opportunities to rethink understandings of masking, empathy, and “the normal.” An individual illness narrative can thus unsettle the generalizing and essentializing forces of  autism-focussed cancer care charts and “check yes or no” disability boxes – even if these are all crucial first steps in education and advocacy. Beyond illustration, illness narratives, individually and collectively, can also ultimately engender empathy and inspire ethical action toward “just and effective healthcare.”.

What follows are excerpts from three hour-long interviews with Lindsey in which we reflect on her first appointment at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre, at which a treatment plan was proposed. I transcribed our Zoom conversations verbatim and then, in the effort of allied representation – to more fully and faithfully translate and recreate our emotions, gestures, and meanings, I added asides and afterthoughts in brackets. Drawn from decades of entrenched kinship bonds, this kind of bracketed “side talk” also speaks to my essential interpretive and authorial role as her proxy.

L: I remember you and [Aunt] Donna being there. That was a *huge* help, you know, *really*. Of course I’m stressed out, like *every* human who has ever had cancer, I’m sure. […] If I had been sitting there just by myself, then all the noise and all the conversations and all the people moving would have been a *lot* more stressful. My rational self was saying, “OK, I’m not the only patient here, they have others things to do”. But part of me is, “can we just DO this please??!!!” (her face briefly shows frustration and impatience).

P: This was 2019, pre-Covid.

L: Yeah, pre-Covid (wistful chuckle). Back then – the nice volunteers brought tea in pretty cups and cookies.  It made me feel more like a guest somewhere rather than just waiting.

P: If you could change something at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre, how would you do so, and how would that specifically help people on the spectrum?

L: […] There were times that I felt overwhelmed by all the motion, noise, people moving around. And you know, my anxiety level is way up, so it would have been nice to have…quiet. […] Everybody’s stressed. It’s not “poor me, I’m worse off,” it’s just all the cross conversations and people moving around and noise stress freaks me out *way* more than it would have the average person.  But I think, well – identical does not mean equal. So, more quiet would make it more equal.

[…] What stressed me out were the doctors who seemed to be in a tearing hurry, like they couldn’t wait to get finished and move on to the next thing, (Her hands flap briefly, indicating speed.)   And then *they* need to be patient with me. Like, ok, you doctors know this stuff cold, but it’s *my* first time hearing it.

P: What do members of your oncology team *not* know about you that you wish they did?

L: Well, I think just that it takes me longer to process things.  I can hear that somebody has said something but, if I don’t react in that very *second*, it doesn’t mean I’m rude or not understanding you.  What helped was doctors who were willing to relate to me more as a person, making me feel like “you’re Lindsey with cancer”, rather than “you’re just cancer”. I think a *lot* of people would feel that way too. It’s normal.

Acting Well

A close reading of Lindsey’s illness narrative reveals complex thematic reining to normalcy and wellness. Part of her essential personality is a gendered, generational and generative impulse to “act well”, in three related senses of the term. The “well” that Lindsey is modelling is threefold: the good patient, the positive patient, and finally, the healthy patient. Acting well, in all of these manifestations represents movement toward the normative, be it imagined or real.  “Acting” here involves some masking, camouflaging, and “making it so,” but it would be unwise to dismiss these impulses in Lindsey as simply performative, or worse, artificial.   If it is “performance,” then it is so only in so far as all patient stories can be said to reveal elements of conscious and unconscious representations of personal and cultural motives and forces.  For Lindsey, her “enacted wellness” is not a masking of a true self, rather it is steeped in expectations from childhood onwards, embodied in empathy as expressed in a profound sense of fairness, and deeply marked with her desire to move beyond just coping and handling and to, in fact, *be* “ok,” be fine. Beyond mere effort and also aspirational, “acting well” is best understood as a key chorus that echoes through her illness story in at least three distinct notes.

First, “acting well” for Lindsey is being a good patient, one who does not complain, criticize or cause trouble. As a “good” patient, she believes strongly in the generous sharing of resources, in waiting her turn, and that there is enough of whatever is needed to go around – notably, time, doctors, information and kindness. And being good, more broadly, is making good out of not good situations, underlined by a strong moral belief that doing so is a sign of strength of character and evidence of growth. Further, this “goodness” is a gender- and age specific skill learned over a lifetime in order to blend in, and appear as if nothing more, nothing else, or nothing different were needed for her care. Wellness as goodness here serves, I suggest, as a kind of complex social camouflaging, and it is not without consequence for her medical care. She is reluctant to express her needs, and believes that the good patient does not do so, or should not have to.

This “goodness” expressed as generosity is also arguably a manifestation of empathy. Rather than a central deficit of autism, for Lindsey, empathy is a radically embodied defining characteristic.  Lindsey often tells me, “so they think somebody with autism doesn’t have empathy?! Ha! They haven’t met me!” As in Peter’s illness narrative, in Lindsey’s story, empathy is manifest primarily as fairness, as a cognitive rather than intuitive recognition and response to the emotional states and needs of others.   For Lindsey, being a good patient, acting “well” in this sense, means being empathetic that others are having similar experiences and have similar needs, and therefore should equitably share the available resources. And here is where, for Lindsey, empathy overlaps with fairness, the right ordering of the world, and, I would argue, borders an aspirational “normal.”

At the second level, Lindsey manifests “acting well” in her positive attitude. She is a positive person, and embraces this as a desirable character trait. She’s certainly not blind to cruelty, apathy or corruption, but she believes that most people in most circumstances do the right thing, and further, that right things follow. Her impulse toward positive thought and belief in its generative power can seem to banish her concerns about poor health, as if consideration were itself the antithesis to hope and wellness. This differs from Badone’s illustrations of Peter’s abilties to detach or elevate himself over immediate abrasive sensory experiences. Badone has in mind physical pain, rather than the psychic costs of maintaining a sustained level of positivity in face of difficult cancer treatments and prognosis. However, neither Peter or Lindsey seem to be “acting” in the sense of fakery or denial, but rather both are en-acting learned, chosen and preferred ways of being, over, against, and in spite of overwhelming physical and emotional stimuli. The conscious and wishful elements of Lindsey’s wellness that are expressed in her positive attitude normalize and further complexify issues of social camouflaging.

Finally, “acting well” also means acting as if she were healthy, as if cancer were now or soon will be in the rearview mirror. We can see this primarily expressed in her desire to be in motion – in moving away or “getting away” from cancer – her love of car rides, her intense focus on returning to work, her commitment to regular exercise, and in the comfort she finds in her routine. Here, wellness is intimately linked to “normal” places and “before” times – before cancer and Covid.  Acting well in this sense also is expressed in her efforts to redefine situations, symptoms, or test results as expected or “normal.” If any of these are unexpected or abnormal, Lindsey understands it as a “one off.” Aberrance happened once; healthiness is the default, the norm, and the future. A restitution narrative reigns across Lindsey’s landscape where the beloved past and the positive future are times of health; the present is a momentary disruption of the norm.

The landscape of “normal” is a potent character in Lindsey’s narrative- set part in history, part in imagination, part in societal construct, and part in longing. “Normal” serves as a kind of hitching post, around which she wraps her reins, trying to ground her reactions, find respite and claim citizenship in the lands of “every patient,” and “like everyone else.” Casting the aberrant in her story as “one offs”, causes the plot to briefly skitter to the side. The understanding of abnormalities as singularities temporarily tightens the reins and tests the hitch’s strength of attachment to the realms of normal and the promised land of restitution. She walks on, trusting in her journey’s forward movement.

On Lindsey’s map, as expressed in this narrative, “normal” shares borders with fairness, equality, and wellness of all kinds. She both wants to travel this landscape of “normal” and live within its borders, and yet she also wants to be treated, cared for, seen and loved for all the ways she dances on its edges. The sands that blow across her storyscape are far more shifting than the simple binaries of the sick and the well, the divergent and the typical, the normal and the not. Rather, there are mobile, dialogical impulses between all of these.

It is one thing to explore the themes of Lindsey’s “wellness-themed” illness narrative, it is quite another to envision how her story could be animated, to see what it could *do*. An attentive listening to and allied translation of her story can go beyond increasing empathy for the lived experience of autism.  Like Badone, I hope that my ongoing work in fashioning an ethnographic illness narrative with Lindsey rests comfortably in its intrinsic incompleteness and “intimations” of autistic experience.   But more than just *showing* life, I hope that Lindsey’s story *has* life, and that its telling not only engenders empathy but also inspires ethical action on the part of the non-autistic person, especially those providing cancer care to women on the autism spectrum.

References

Badone, Ellen, David Nicholas, Wendy Roberts and Peter Kein (2016). Asperger’s syndrome, subjectivity and the senses. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry (40), pp. 475-506. doi:10.1007/s11013-016-9484-9

Bradley, Louise et al. (2021). Autistic adults’ experiences of camouflaging and its perceived impact on mental health. Autism in Adulthood (3) 4, pp.320-329. doi:10.1089/aut2020.0071

Charon, Rita, Sayantani DasGupta, Nellie Hermann, Craig Irvine, Eric R. Marcus, Edgar Rivera Colon, Danielle Spencer and Maura Spiegel (2017) The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press.

Frank, Arthur W. (2010). Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Frank, Arthur W. (2017). An illness of one’s own: Memoir as art form and research as witness. Cogent Arts and Humanities (4), pp.1-7 doi:10.1080/23311983.2017.1343654

Greenhalgh, Trisha and Brian Hurwitz (1999). Narrative based medicine: Why study narrative? BMJ Clinical Research (308), pp.48-50

Nosek, Marcianna, Holly Powell Kennedy and Maria Gudmundsdottir (2012). ‘Chaos, restitution and quest’- one woman’s journey through menopause. Sociology of Health and Illness (34)7, pp. 994-1009. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9566.2011.01453.x

Peterkin, Allan (2012). Practical strategies for practising narrative-based medicine. Canadian Family Physician (58), pp.63-64

Shapiro, Johanna (2011). Illness narratives: Reliability, authenticity and the empathic witness. Med Humanities (37)2, pp.68-72

Sue, Kyle, Paolo Mazzotta, and Elizabeth Grier (2019). Palliative care for patients with communication and cognitive difficulties. Canadian Family Physician (65), pp.S19-S24

Vuattoux, Delphine, Sara Colomer-Lahiguera, Pierre-Alain Fernandez, Marine Jequier Gygax, Marie-Louise Choucair, Maja Beck-Popovic, Manuel Diezi, Sabine Manificat, Sofiya Latifyan, Anne-Sylvie Ramelet, Manuela Eicher, Nadia Chabane and Raffaele Renella (2021). Cancer care of children, adolescents, and adults with autism spectrum disorders: Key information and strategies for oncology teams. Frontiers in Oncology (10), pp.1-9. doi:10.3389/fonc.2020.595734

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A Holistic and Ethnographic Approach to Japanese Religious Community: A Gift from My Mentor

By Hisako Omori, Akita International University

As a member of an academic community, we all have our “home ground” so to speak—be it methodologically defined or topically bound. At least it is my hope that we all have a sense of belonging in the vast landscape of the academic world. As students of Dr. Ellen Badone, ours is in between anthropology and religious studies. Our mentor has dedicated her energy and talent for over four decades, training many of us in the field of anthropology of religion. I was her student during my postgraduate education, finishing my M.A. in 2004 and Ph.D. in 2011 under her supervision at McMaster University. Reflecting back, the nearly ten years that I spent at McMaster University was one of the most precious times of my life. My training at McMaster could not have come at a more opportune time. Dr. Badone served as the President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR), a subsection of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), from 2005 to 2007. As her students, we were therefore exposed to emerging frontline works in the field as well as the luminaries of the anthropology of religions at various conferences. It is an honour to write this essay on the occasion of her retirement. In what follows, I share some seminal influences that I received from her, focusing on a holistic approach to the study of religion, the benefit of ethnographic fieldwork in Japanese contexts, and a humanistic approach to our subjects.

It was my methodological quest which led me to my fortunate encounter with Dr. Badone at McMaster University. As a native of Japan, I always had a difficult time understanding religions in Japan. The majority of Japanese population go and visit Shinto shrines for the new year celebration, and the same people would go to Buddhist temples for the ancestors’ week in mid-summer. They do not think it is strange to practice two different religions simultaneously. Furthermore, I grew up in the postwar period  when Japanese people were eager to attain economic growth while also willing to be in a state of amnesia about intense wartime efforts to portray the emperor as a kami. The Japanese society I knew was not eager to talk about matters of religion. Still, customs and conventions relating to death continued as a matter of necessity, and seasonal celebrations involving rituals were conducted, displaying rich local variety. Public discourse on the supernatural, however, was limited. I experienced two well-known Japanese traditions — Buddhism and Shinto — as rather static, not demonstrating active engagements with ordinary people. In retrospect, so-called New Religions (shinshūkyō) were active during this period, but back then, I did not have a bird’s-eye view of the Japanese religious landscape as I do now. As a young woman, I learned our virtues were being polite, implicit in our words, and always paying attention to what others are thinking. I was raised to privilege the intention, feelings, and desires of others. These culturally-encoded expectations were communicated through movements, gestures, and facial expressions; in other words, not through spoken words. To complicate matters further, I struggled to understand my native religious traditions through the lenses of Western idioms using categories and ideas derived from monotheistic cultural traditions. At that time, the Shinto tradition’s conspicuous lack of creeds or elaborate teachings appeared strange when compared to Christianity or Islam.

My intellectual encounter with Ellen, as I have come to call her over time, provided me with a solution to this vexing problem of how to understand religious traditions in Japanese society. By reading seminal work in the anthropology of religion in her graduate seminars, I was able to trace the ways in which European and American anthropologists had struggled to understand the “magical” worlds of Trobriand islanders, the Azande, and Haitian migrants (Brown 1991, Evans-Pritchard 1976, Malinowski [1922]1984). My dis-ease over how to approach Japanese religious practices gradually dissipated. As I delved deeper into anthropological approaches to cultural practices and customs, it became clear that various aspects of our lives such as geography, climate, subsistence patterns, political systems, and hierarchical relationships stratified by age and gender—these spheres of mundane life in Japan emerged as constitutive elements to form daily practices. I came to form a holistic perspective, that is to view “[t]he various parts of human culture and biology […] in the broadest possible context in order to understand their interconnections and interdependence” (Haviland et al., 2017:3). Gradually, an anthropological, holistic approach to religious practices had become my tool to unravel and understand Japanese religious traditions. Take a food item as an example.

Over many years, food items seen in ritual contexts have become my point of entry into thinking about religious practices. I vividly remember seeing a piece of dried seaweed on my apartment floor in Hamilton, Ontario. The food item must have fallen on the floor when cooking earlier. As Ontarians do not eat much seafood (unlike their Nova Scotian counterparts), seaweed was a rather exotic item in this geographical context. I did have it, however, as that was my “ethnic food” item, which I was ablet to purchase in nearby city of Toronto. Catching sight of a tiny black piece of seaweed, an exotic food item out of place in Ontario, at the corner of my eyes, all of a sudden, the use of seaweed in a talisman used in Japan made clear sense to me. Seaweeds of particular kinds have been treasured by people on the Japanese archipelagoes for centuries. They can be eaten raw, cooked, and used as a material to make broth. They are an essential food item and, in fact, can be expensive, depending on the kind. In northern Japan where I grew up, people purchase talismans made of rice straws, decorated with dried sardines, seaweeds, and paper streamers before the new year. In my grandmother’s house, these items are hung at various corners of a household to ward off negative spiritual forces so that the household community can make a safe transition to the new year. Seeing the rice, fish, and seaweed as sustenance treasured in the region, it makes sense that these are hung prominently to welcome the spirit of the new year. Prior to encountering anthropological approaches to rituals and symbols, I was not able to understand the numerous layers of meanings embedded in religious items and their significance vis-à-vis their environment.

This realization led me to another epiphany: I was able to see bread and wine in both Jewish and Christian liturgical contexts from different perspectives. The breaking of bread, sharing it among community members, and drinking wine and dining together—these are central ritual acts, full of symbolic significance, employed in the Jewish sabbath,
Roman Catholic mass, and Christian Eucharist in many traditions. Wheat, grapes, and oil can be construed as essential dietary items in the Middle East, Africa, and southern Europe where these traditions were nurtured in their infancy. Gradually, holistic approaches to religious practices and worldviews became my mainstay of academic approaches. I owe this formation of my foundational perspective to Ellen—not only for teaching me about them, but also for her encouragement to explore similar approaches practiced in neighbouring disciplines such as archaeology and history through graduate coursework.

Another aspect of the holistic perspective that I was trained in, and has curious implications in the study of religious traditions in Japanese contexts, is ethnographic fieldwork. As mentioned previously, non-verbal communication is highly valued and also commonplace in Japan. One may speculate that the declaration of one’s faith or debating theological issues publicly may not be, culturally speaking, popular in contemporary Japan.  Intentions, desire, resistance, reluctance, and even hope—one’s emotional positionality—tend not to be expressed openly, but nevertheless gleaned through actions, inaction, and other nonverbal ways. Ritual actions weigh heavily in Japan and adopting ethnographic approaches to the study of religion emerged as a practical and necessary strategy for me. Ethnographic fieldwork enabled me to collect data that existed and was observable but not necessarily expressed in words. Thanks to my mentor who took the time to guide me while I was in the field—be it in Canada or in Japan, I was able to document sensitivities expressed in ways beyond verbal means.

Lastly, I also wish to note a humanistic approach to our subjects as something that I always hope to follow the example of my mentor. I believe many of us remember seeing a black and white photo on her office wall, in which young Ellen, the anthropologist, poses with an interlocutor in the field in rural France. As an anthropologist who is committed to protect the privacy of research participants, she has never revealed any of her research participants’ identities. From listening to her stories over many years, however, I had an impression that she knows some of them very well for an extended period of time.  For me, the photo signified her respect for her subjects with whom she must have formed lasting relationships. It is common to display one’s degree certificates on the office wall. But instead of showing her educational achievements, she hung that photo from the field. During my graduate training, I was introduced to the works of Kirin Narayan (1989), Barbara Myerhoff (1979), and Renato Rosaldo (2014), and led to think of our positions vis-à-vis the very people we study as human subjects. These works also guided us to think of our own vulnerability as humans studying other humans (Abu-Lughod 1988, Narayan 1993, Panourgia 1994). Our reflexive response is often used to measure what is happening in the field, although our focus and eyes are firmly placed on those we study. Although I learned as much as I could from her examples, at the same time, I always feel that I would never attain the level of humanity that Ellen has shown to those around her including towards her research participants.

Those who study religion may focus on scriptures, teachings, architecture, media representations, and the elites or virtuosi of a certain tradition. Ethnographic methods, however, allow us to focus on ordinary people. In many other academic fields, the messy human aspects that we encounter as we conduct research may be disliked, ignored, or even deleted due to their sensitive nature when writing the final reports. In Dr. Badone, I have witnessed a humanistic approach to being an ethnographer and I will continue to look up to her example.

Ellen was always open to our intellectual curiosity, as well. I was among the students who were studying lay communities of Roman Catholics, the area Ellen worked on for many years (Badone 1989, 1990, 2008, 2014, 2017). While I was at McMaster, she was supervising a wide range of topics such as a pilgrimage to Lourdes (Agnew 2019) and Québec (Smith 2011), conversion to Catholicism in Tokyo (Omori 2020), but also North African Muslim migrants to Paris (Selby 2012) to name a few. Ellen did not dismiss her student’s intellectual curiosity, and patiently accompanied our intellectual journey.

In 2018, Ellen travelled with her family and our mutual friend to the area where I lived in rural Japan. We visited numerous summer festivals in the region. As we travelled together, Ellen pushed numerous boundaries, both physical and intellectual. I learned so much more about the city in which I lived, and struggled to keep up with her pace both physically and intellectually. Listening to the rousing drums of the Neputa Festival in Aomori City, we were mesmerized by the flooding of colourful lights from decorated float after the float. While enjoying the festival soundscape, and the cool summer breeze off the bay of Mutsuwan, Ellen reminded me of how the beating of the drums is used in various cultures to transform our psychic state, which in turn, made me think of a body of literature on shamanism. She had clapped her hands enthusiastically a few moments earlier, but then made this coolheaded observational and analytical comment. Watching her enjoying the Neputa, confirmed her superb intellect and ethnographic abilities. Ellen was an anthropologist wherever she was. As I nodded to acknowledge her comment, I felt truly grateful for being her graduate student, and continue to cherish her analytic and compassionate mind. I was able to leave behind my early frustrations observing religious expressions in Japan. Ellen has taught me a key approach to see the world; through an ethnographic method, we can cast an inquisitive but empathic gaze on our fellow humans.

Works Cited

Abu-Lughod, Lila (1988). Fieldwork of a Dutiful Daughter. In: S. Altorki and C. F. El-Solh (eds.), Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, pp. 139-162.

Agnew, Michael (2019). “This is a glimpse of Paradise”: Encountering Lourdes Through Serial and Multisited Pilgrimage. Journal of Global Catholicism 3 (1), Article 3.

Badone, Ellen (1989). The Appointed Hour: Death, Worldview, and Social Change in Britany. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Badone, Ellen, ed (1990).  Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Badone, Ellen (2008). Pilgrimage, Tourism and the Da Vinci Code at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France. Culture and Religion 9, pp. 23-44.

Badone, Ellen (2014). New pilgrims on a medieval route: mobility and community on the Tro Breiz. Culture and Religion 15 (4), pp. 452-473.

Badone, Ellen (2017). The Rosary as a Meditation on Death at a Marian Apparition Shrine. In:  Kristin Norget, Valentina Napolitano and Maya Mayblin (eds.), The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 201-210.

Brown, Karen McCarthy (1991). Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Covell, Stephen G. 2005. Japanese Temple Buddhism: Worldliness in a Religion of Renunciation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1976). Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford University Press.

Haviland, William A., Harald E. L. Prins, Bunny McBride, and Dana Walrath. 2017. Cultural Anthropology: The Human challenge. The Fifteenth Edition. Boston: Cengage Learning.

Malinowski, Bronislaw ([1922] 1984). Argonauts of the western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian with a preface by James George Frazer. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Myerhoff, Barbara G. (1978). Number Our Days. New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster.

Narayan, Kirin (1989). Storytellers, saints, and scoundrels: folk narrative in Hindu religious teaching. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Narayan, Kirin (1993). How Native Is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist? American Anthropologist 95 (3), pp. 671–86.

Omori, Hisako. (2020). From Situated Selves to the Self: Conversion and Personhood among Roman Catholics in Tokyo. Albany: SUNY Press.

Panourgia, Neni (1994). “A Native Narrative.” Anthropology and Humanism 19 (1), pp. 40-51.

Rosaldo, Renato (2014). Grief and Headhunter’s Rage. In: The Day of Shelly’s Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief. Duke University Press, 2014, pp. 117-138.

Selby, Jennifer A. (2012). Questioning French Secularism: Gender Politics and Islam in a Parisian Suburb.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Smith, Sherry A. (2011). Encountering Anne: Journeys to Sainte Anne de Beaupré. PhD Dissertation, Department of Religious Studies, McMaster University.

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From Worldview to Lifeworld, Prescription to Practice: Being and Becoming an Ethnographer

By Angela Robinson PhD, Grenfell Campus, Memorial University

The seeds of progress germinate, and the shape of the future unfolds in our conviviality, at the convergence of all our different paths. It is in this gradual cross-fertilization that the future of knowledge, and indeed of the world, resides. (Federico Mayor, 1991)

When I set out to study specific tangible and intangible aspects of Indigenous society and culture I was ill prepared to navigate through the diversity and complexity of Indigenous lifeways that I was about to encounter in the field. While being a non-Indigenous, English-speaking researcher posed anticipated obstacles, reconciling metaphysical and philosophical differences between Indigenous ways of knowing and being in comparison to those promoted within the academy proved even more daunting. Requisite to the process of successfully unpacking the intricacies of hybridized Western and traditional Indigenous cultural expression were skills and abilities I had yet to hone. My PhD supervisor, Dr. Ellen Badone was instrumental in assisting with the many challenges presented in my area of study in reference to championing interdisciplinary research and in helping me shift away from decidedly etic thinking towards more emically-grounded perspectives.

In the mid-1990s when I began research on Indigenous culture and society, to a great extent, Frederico Mayor’s words had yet to land on fertile ground. Although the very ideas of paradigmatic shifts and the necessity of interdisciplinary research were being discussed broadly, and were provisionally agreed upon, neither had been fully accommodated within academic institutions and between diverse academic disciplines. In the twenty-first century, a steady increase in interdisciplinary research has been widely reported across academia along with greater levels of knowledge transfer between subjects and among researchers. At present, many high-impact discoveries often occur at the intersection of disciplines, and interdisciplinary approaches are now regarded as necessary to tackling contemporary complex societal challenges in that it offers innovative approaches to current research questions and present-day challenges. However, to some extent, resistance to interdisciplinary studies prevails. Studies show that in many instances, particularly within the “pure” sciences, interdisciplinary research remains an unrewarding enterprise that is often associated with lower citation rates and is less likely to be funded than those with more specialized focus (Levitt and Thelwall 2008, Bromhaml et al. 2016).

When I began study at McMaster University, there were few Religious Studies programs and a limited number of academics across Canada who could, or would, oversee my chosen area of study. In effect, Indigenous studies remained soundly within the purview of anthropology, and “religious” studies was retained under its own title.  At the time, the very idea of cross/interdisciplinary studies was rarely entertained in Religious Studies departments. However, I had just graduated from a M.Phil program at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador that combined the study of history, philosophy, religion, and political science within the context of critical and literary theory. Fellow scholars with whom I studied came from a broad range of disciplines including fine arts, religious studies, philosophy, history, and English literature. All of whom were exploring new pathways to independent and innovative research and were encouraged to defy discipline-specific boundaries, to adopt diverse and multiple scholarly lenses, and to challenge traditional scholarship in various and interesting ways. These were heady times and arguably ones that invigorated research areas and topics of investigation, defied rigid definitions, and encouraged scholarly creativity.  I was anxious to test out what I had learned by researching Indigenous faith-based beliefs alongside values and practices otherwise derived within the context of Religious Studies. It was my way of pushing what I considerer to be a well-defended boundary. In order to more fully understand my chosen area of study, conducting ethnographic research was essential. However, I had a limited background in anthropology so the list of  potential schools and advisors that could accommodate my request were in short supply.

I came to understand that if there was any possibility of pursuing my research interests, studying at McMaster University under Dr. Badone was one of the few options available. While it has never been explicitly stated, I always felt that, against the odds, Dr. Badone had fought for my admission to McMaster. She recognized the potential for my research and was willing to take on the challenge of getting me through the program in defiance of some deeply-held convictions about what constituted “religion” and staunchly-protected scholarly approaches to the same. Ellen had already bridged a divide by being cross-appointed to both Religious Studies and Anthropology, which spoke volumes about her scholarly abilities to teach and publish within these two disciplines. At the time, the divide between both these areas was palpable. Even today, the tensions remain to some extent as many scholars do not consider specific Indigenous cultural tenets, expressions and practices to be “religious,” opting to apply the more nebulous terms, spirituality or traditionalism instead. Indeed, in defiance of imposed Western labeling, many Indigenous people reject such attempts to define Indigenous lifeways. Importantly, in keeping with reconciliation processes, Indigenous persons and communities tend to reject references to historical and contemporary philosophies and practices as “religion” since it is seen as a tool used by the oppressors to achieve some rather violent ends. On a personal (and professional) note, I have problems with traditional/historical nomenclature. In the interest of decolonization, I suggest that increased focus on reconfiguring Western terms, concepts and references to reflect non-Western perspectives is not only compellingly interesting but that the entire process would be of great benefit to Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholarship.

Importantly, as a twenty-first century graduate, I was the only student studying Indigenous lifeways within the Religious Studies department at McMaster. I was an anomaly, but I found a quick and true mentor and friend in Ellen. Of course, others were instrumental in assisting with the PhD process, but it was my professional and personal relationship with Ellen helped propel me forward. Like many of those who challenge long-standing traditions, there was some resistance from our respective peers. In addition to the fact that my taking on a new field of study as an ethnographer with limited training was daunting, none of my peers were familiar with my area of study. Again, Ellen was instrumental is navigating me through these challenges.

Even though my most recent degree, an M.Phil (Humanities) was grounded in post-colonial philosophies, its pedagogy derived from a decidedly Western-focus. That, in combination with my limited experience within the field of anthropology, one of the greatest challenges I faced was to understand anthropology as a discipline and to adopt the role of ethnographer. With a research focus on contemporary Mi’kmaw Catholicism, as it was understood and practiced in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, a familiarity with both Roman Catholicism and a grounding in ethnographic research methodologies and practices were required. Importantly, Ellen’s work on folk/local religious lifeways in Brittainy had an indelible impact on my work. Her scholarship provided me with an appreciation for multiple and complex social-cultural and historical contexts that inform contemporary Mi’kmaw tangible and intangible culture. The ethnographic sensibilities passed on helped in the collection of research data, and in appreciating the ways in which specific aspects of Mi’kmaw lifeways were/are defined and expressed, in general, and more specifically with respect to Mi’kmaw Catholicism in the twenty-first century. For instance, Ellen’s insight into distinctions between dogma and local practice, or as William A. Christian would say, differences between “religion” as prescribed and “religion” as practised (Christian 1981), informed my overall approach to the study of Mi’kmaw Catholicism. This distinction served as a basis for one of the most significant strategies informing my work as it helped in identifying culturally-specific ways of knowing and understanding local practices, their intergenerational appeal, and their persistence over time.

One of the most difficult aspects of completing my PhD was writing my dissertation. That I had collected more information than I could ever use was one thing, but the fact that I had so much difficulty conceptualizing what I had learned into a Western framework meant that disseminating my research was equally problematic. As a Western thinker I was accustomed to concepts of time and events, and perceptions of reality that followed along a decidedly linear path.  By Ellen’s insistence, I dove into the filed of anthropology seeking ways to learn, think and write about how non-Western thinkers apprehend and understand the world in which they live. I then turned to the work of Michael Jackson (1995, 1996) and to linguistic anthropology in order to unpack the philosophical and existential puzzles that lay before me. I needed to understand how Mi’kmaw Catholicism and Mi’kmaw philosophies as expressed through language (predominantly English and Mi’kmaw), and observed through ritual, existed within this complex cultural frame. The importance of the anthropological insights that Ellen provided cannot be overstated in this case: while many Mi’kmaq have a basic understanding of at least two languages (English and Mi’kmaw), it was evident that Mi’kmaw “worldviews” cannot easily expressed in the former, but resided in the nuanced and distinct expressions within the latter. It was a revelation to me that the Mi’kmaw philosophies of time, experience, “religion,” and worldly existence are fluid; they exist outside rigid categorization, reside within the “domain of everyday, immediate” experience, and are best understood a part of an ever-changing lifeworld (Jackson 1996). In this case, Ellen lead me to the world of open-minded scholarship within which it is requisite to set aside cultural privilege, and Western categorizations in favor of something more culturally diverse and compellingly interesting.

Here, only a few examples of the ways in which Ellen Badone has contributed to my growth as a scholar and as a person are mentioned. Her mentorship and guidance through what was a difficult and challenging process for me, speaks to her personal integrity, her commitment to scholarship, and indeed her readiness to accept a challenge. Ellen is about to undertake endeavours of her own choosing which, for certain, will be met with the grace and integrity that has marked her career.

References

Badone, Ellen (1989). The Appointed Hour: Death Worldview and Social Change in Brittany. Berkeley: University of California Press.

_______ . (1990). Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society. (Ed).  Princeton: Princeton U. Press.

Bromham, L., Dinnage, R. & Hua, X. (2016). Interdisciplinary research has consistently lower funding success. Nature 534, 684–687.

Christian, William A. Jr. (1981) Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Jackson, Michael (1995) At Home in the World. London: Durham U. Press.

_______ . (1996). Things as They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Levitt, J. M. & Thelwall, M. (2008). Is multidisciplinary research more highly cited? A macrolevel study. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 59, 1973–1984.

Mayor, Frederico (1991) Opening Address, UNESCO International Symposium on Interdisciplinarity,  https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000089508

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Ellen Badone’s Anthropology of Religion

By Jennifer A. Selby, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador

Attention to reflexivity and vivid ethnographic-based findings on illness and death in North America and Europe, among others, make Ellen Badone’s contributions to the anthropology of religion significant. In this short essay, I draw on Badone’s impressive more-than-40-year corpus of work, particularly on the changing contexts of death and dying in France and Canada, to ask: how does Badone engage definitions of “religion”?

To be clear: I do not answer this question directly. Rather, I will argue that how Badone approaches religion is notable. More specifically, I suggest that we can learn from how she effectively foregrounds her interlocutors as she weaves in theory and ethnography in her writing. Badone’s genuine vulnerability and care in her ethnographic writing offer us a model of how to conduct and present ourselves in scholarship related to some of life’s greatest traumas and mysteries, namely the moment of death. Her exceptional listening and pivoting abilities are apparent in many aspects of her work. In what follows, I comment on her sensitive engagement with her interlocutors, before turning to her supervisory skills, and her deep engagement with the field of the anthropology of religion.

Prioritizing Interlocutors

I begin by drawing on a favorite publication of Badone’s to re/read and teach, “Reflections on Death, Religion, Identity, and the Anthropology of Religion.” This chapter from A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion is an autoethnographic account in which Ellen candidly sketches her own transnational and multi-religious family history alongside her anthropologically centered conceptualization of religion.

Through a three-century-long lens of her paternal family’s migration and religiosity, alongside evocative family photographs, Badone elegantly theorizes the broader ethnographic endeavor of studying “religion.” She focuses on her father Louis Badone’s life and death in the UK and Canada, and his mixed Italian Catholic and Russian Jewish ancestry. When he migrated from the UK to Toronto in the 1950s, Louis was able to “pass” into a life of British ethnicity and Anglican life-lite. He became an avid amateur British Protestant historian and heritage protector in Toronto, both notable as these passions belied his genetic and familial connections. Louis was an atheist, but one who recognized the social capital in having his daughters confirmed in the Anglican church. Still, his life in Toronto remained shaped by anti-Semitism and his socioeconomic circumstances. His emotional reluctance toward all things religious meant that – beginning with trying to stop her from reading the biography of Swedish Christian theologian, Emanuel Swendenborg when she was 10 – he certainly couldn’t have imagined that Ellen would go on to study religion professionally.

In this essay, as she assesses her father’s ability to seemingly suspend his own history and worldviews to pass as white and Anglican, Ellen is prompted to reflect on her own positionality. This realization is interesting, especially in light of the reluctance she expresses in her first book, The Appointed Hour: Death, Worldview and Social Change in Brittany (1989: xiii), to describe “in greater personal detail either the deaths that have taken place in my own family or those of people I knew in Brittany.” Yet, twenty-five years later, as a senior, tenured and well-established scholar in the field, she is perhaps afforded her greater ease in her vulnerable posthumous account of Louis’ life and death.

Through her sketch of Louis, we also come to appreciate why Brittany, its Celtic influences, amidst a French Catholic context animated Ellen’s early work. Her known gusto for French language, culture and food might be traced back to Louis’ connection with “Ma Vieille,” his family’s French family domestic worker. Her empathy related to death and the dying might be partially explained by her younger sister’s premature and tragic death. Together, we are left with the impression that these parts of her past certainly influenced her understandings of death and ritual in France.

Reading Ellen’s many contributions to thinking on death, healing and pilgrimage remind us that we should – hopefully – bring into the foreground our interlocutors’ experiences, while also allowing for vulnerability of our own. The ethnographer’s embodied self remains a window into the domains she analyses.

Prioritizing Students

The essay’s humble and steadfast tone further encapsulates Ellen’s positionality in relation to the nearly 50 graduate students she has supervised to date. Throughout my doctoral work and beyond, I have seen her approach academic conferences and graduate supervision with the same care and selflessness as she does her ethnographic work. In contrast to the tales that circulated in University Hall about other less available supervisors, Ellen’s listening skills and willingness to pivot were evidenced by her willingness to supervise dissertations in a range of field sites and topics. Ellen genuinely jumped into these terrains with her graduate students. She was not extractive. Her interactions with her students were not about expanding her own publications or career. They were about care, curiosity and excitement about new potential directions.

Ellen’s commitment to her students extended beyond the intellectual. For me, some meetings while she was Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at McMaster University were especially memorable. On one occasion, we met in Paris, long after the completion of my dissertation. Another time, on a snowy afternoon on New Year’s Eve in 2014, she drove out to the Pearson Airport from Hamilton, promising to break up a long layover for me (as I traveled from Europe with my then-toddler and baby), meeting me and my family with her own. As usual, she was eager to hear about my fieldwork and engage with us all. I especially appreciated this support when I began my doctoral fieldwork outside of Paris. Over the 22 months I lived in a suburb she remained a steadfast email correspondent. In one note from October 28, 2004, in response to a 3-page missive I had sent about issues in the first 8 weeks in France (with mold in my residence, poor health, residency card woes, and impediments with fieldwork access and banking), she carefully heard me on each issue, did some googling, which gave her a window into the organizations I described, and signed off with “We’re all thinking of you here and wishing you the best!”

Thinking back to dozens of lunches and chats when the conversation would turn to her, Ellen would share stories about her own children, and the fieldwork plans and findings of her graduate students, networking for their benefit. These skills – of being present, of fully listening, of not centring herself – were mobilized throughout her career as a theorist of religion, as well.

Prioritizing the Anthropology of Religion

Returning to this same essay, with her characteristic curious and acerbic approach, Badone asks: “Can one be an anthropologist of religion and still have religious faith?” (2013: 437).  Like in her previous work, Badone overviews the requisite theoretical literature on alterity and death, referencing theorists such as Malinowski, Tylor and Csordas. More interestingly, particularly in light of her understanding of inheritance, lineage and her interest in the anthropology of religion, she leans toward the possibilities afforded by a decidedly anthropological perspective. She professes, “Ultimately, I am caught between faith and skepticism. Perhaps the one religious system I can embrace is anthropology” (2013: 441). While the perhaps catches a nod to theoretical agnosticism, she leans into the nuance afforded by reflexivity. Moreover, comparing her approach toward reflexivity in her first book with this later approach also shows us that our thinking on it need not be static.

Ellen has experienced and grappled with significant loss, which has clearly informed her ethnographic work. Beginning with her doctoral work in Brittany, in subtle and sensitive ways, Badone has always considered the person behind the fieldwork. As captured in “Reflections on Death, Religion, Identity, and the Anthropology of Religion,” her experience of her father’s death clearly raised life-long questions that fell close to home. Still, her work has shifted. As her personal situation changed, her field sites also shifted to look at pilgrimage in France (2014a, 2014b, 2017), Asperger’s syndrome (2016), and, most recently, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on long-term care in Ontario (2021, 2022).

The impacts of her thoughtful vulnerability, especially for thinking through the anthropology of religion at the moment of death, have innumerable theoretical implications. Badone reminds us that theoretical engagement is important, but the personal and a deliberate focus on ethnography and our participants in all their complexity are paramount to this approach.

In sum, Badone’s theory and practice, in her ethnography, her supervision and in her writing, stress the usefulness of seeing religion anthropologically. Her decidedly anthropological approach continues to teach me two valuable lessons: first, that the way people live and practice can be messy and defy easy categorization or theorization; these ideas also change. And second, that approaching our fieldwork in ways that also make it deeply personal renders the engagement and theoretical findings all the more meaningful.

References

Badone, Ellen (2022). Commentary. The New Death. In: Shannon Lee Dawdy and Tamara Knees (eds.), The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-First Century, Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research (SAR) Press, pp. 279-298.

Badone, Ellen (2021). From Cruddiness to Catastrophe: COVID-19 and Long-Term Care in Ontario. Medical Anthropology 40, pp. 389–403.

Badone, Ellen (2017). The Rosary as a Meditation on Death at a Marian Apparition Shrine. In: Kristin Norget, Valentina Napolitano and Maya Mayblin (eds.), The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader,  Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 201-210.

Badone, Ellen (2014a). Conventional and Unconventional Pilgrimages: Conceptualizing Sacred Travel in the Twenty-First Century. In: Antón M. Pazos (ed.), Redefining Pilgrimage: New Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Pilgrimages, Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 7-32.

Badone (2014b). New Pilgrims on a Medieval Route: Mobility and Community on the Tro Breiz. Culture and Religion 15(4), pp.452- 473.

Badone, Ellen (2013) Reflections on Death, Religion, Identity, and the Anthropology of Religion. In: Janice Boddy and Michael Lambek (eds), A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 425-443.

Badone, Ellen (2008). Pilgrimage, Tourism and the Da Vinci Code at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France. Culture and Religion 9, pp. 23-44.

Badone, Ellen (2007). Echoes from Kerizinen: Pilgrimage, Narrative and the Construction of Sacred History at a Marian Shrine in Northwestern France.  Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 pp.453-470.

Badone, Ellen (1989). The Appointed Hour: Death Worldview and Social Change in Brittany. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Badone, Ellen, David Nicholas, Wendy Roberts, and Peter Kien (2016) Asperger’s Syndrome, Subjectivity and the Senses. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 40 pp.475–506.

Fitzgerald, Timothy (2000). The Ideology of Religious Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.