Badone Ellen, Professor, Religious Studies

Ellen Badone

Professor, Religious Studies

Emeritus Faculty
Department of Anthropology

Members
Institute on Globalization & the Human Condition

Emeritus Faculty
Department of Religious Studies

Area(s) of Interest:

Biography

Research & Supervisory Interests

Over the past three decades, my research has centred on experiences of social, emotional and bodily crisis as well as healing. My initial fieldwork, in 1983-84, in Brittany, France, focused on interpretations of death and dying. I was particularly interested in changes in Breton responses to death that had accompanied social change in this region since 1945. My research on death led me in two directions: anthropology of religion and medical anthropology. In the late 1980s, I worked on the relationships between alternative healing and the biomedical system in Brittany. In addition, I edited a volume of papers on the tensions between Catholic orthodoxy and popular definitions of religion in Europe. My dual focus on religion and healing inspired me to work on pilgrimage. In the 1990s, I did fieldwork on local pilgrimages in Brittany and on a Marian apparition shrine. More recently, I worked at Les Saintes-Maries de-la-Mer in southern France, a shrine that is particularly important for Roma pilgrims. From 2005-07, I was president of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, a sub-section of the American Anthropological Association. In the summer of 2012, I participated in the Tro Breiz, a walking pilgrimage in Brittany that links the medieval cathedral towns of the region. Although I am still passionately interested in pilgrimage and other religious quests to understand the world, my current work deals with responses to existential crises evoked through encounters with aging, autism spectrum disorders and mental illness.

Education

University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D., 1985

Teaching

Search course offerings in Anthropology

Sport and/ as Religion

Religion, Magic and Witchcraft

Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology

Research

Monographs

The Appointed Hour: Death, Worldview and Social Change in Brittany. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989.

Edited Volumes

Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism. Edited with Sharon R. Roseman. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Journal Articles

"From Cruddiness to Catastrophe: COVID-19 and Long-term Care in Ontario." Medical Anthropology May 28, 2021.
“Folk Literature and the Invention of Tradition: The Case of the Barzaz Breiz,” Journal of American Folklore 130(516):204-218, 2017.
“Asperger’s Syndrome, Subjectivity and the Senses,” (co-authored with David Nicholas, Wendy Roberts and Peter Kien), Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 40(3):475-506, 2016.
“Religious Heritage and the Re-enchantment of the World in Brittany.” Material Religion 11 (2015): 4-24.
“Special Section: Pilgrimage to the Holy Lands. Afterword.” Religion and Society: Advances in Research 5 (2014): 200-204.
“New Pilgrims on a Medieval Route: Mobility and Community on the Tro Breiz.” Culture and Religion 15 (2014): 452-473.
“La Bretagne depuis trente ans: le regard d’une ethnologue canadienne.” Ethnologie française 4 (2012): 635-645.
“Pilgrimage, Tourism and the Da Vinci Code at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France.” Culture and Religion 9 (2008): 23-44.
“Illness, Biomedicine and Alternative Healing in Brittany, France.” Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 27 (2008): 190-218.
“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 (2007): 453-470.
“Mortality, Medicines and Technologies.” (Invited Review Article of On Our Way: The Final Passage Through Life and Death, Robert Kastenbaum. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004; Remaking Life and Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences, Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock, eds. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2003; and Social Lives of Medicines. Susan Reynolds Whyte, Sjaak van der Geest, and Anita Hardon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.) American Anthropologist 107 (2005): 501-504.
"Suspending Disbelief: An Encounter with the Occult in Brittany." Anthropology and Humanism 20 (1995): 7-12.
"The Construction of National Identity in Brittany and Quebec." (Invited Review Article of: Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec, by Richard Handler. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988; and We are not French! Language, Culture and Identity in Brittany, by Maryon McDonald. London: Routledge, 1989.) American Ethnologist, 19 (1992): 806-817.
"Ethnography, Fiction, and the Meanings of the Past in Brittany." American Ethnologist 18 (1991): 618-646.

Book Chapters

"After-Death Communications: Signs from the Otherworld in Contemporary North America." In a Companion to the Anthropology of Death, Antonius C.G.M. Robben ed. Pp. 293-305. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2018.
“The Rosary as a Meditation on Death at a Marian Apparition Shrine,” In The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader. Kristin Norget, Valentina Napolitano and Maya Mayblin eds. Pp. 201-210. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2017.
“Eat, Pray, Love and Tourism Imaginaries.” In Constructions of Self and Other in Yoga, Travel and Tourism: A Journey to Elsewhere, Lori G. Beaman and Sonia Sikka, eds. Pp. 37-43. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
"Conventional and Unconventional Pilgrimages: Conceptualizing Sacred Travel in the Twenty-First Century." Pages 7-31 in Redefining Pilgrimage: New Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Pilgrimages. Edited by Anton Pazos. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014.
"Reflections on Death, Religion, Identity and the Anthropology of Religion." Pages 425-443 in A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion. Edited by Janice Boddy and Michael Lambek. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2013.
"Pardons, Pilgrimage and the (Re-)construction of Identities in Brittany." Pages 145-161 in Gender, Nation and Religion in European Pilgrimage. Edited by Willy Jansen and Catrien Notermans. Ashgate: Farnham, Surrey, UK, 2012.