Institutional Care for our Elders: A Conversation with Dr. Ellen Badone

Abstract

Dr. Badone holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and is Professor Emerita in the departments of Anthropology and Religious Studies at McMaster University. She has spent her career as an anthropologist studying how people construct meaning in the face of death and dying. Her initial research focus was on the social and cultural context of aging, dying, and death in Brittany, France. For her dissertation and first book, she studied religious practices relating to death and ideas about the afterlife. When we sat down for our interview, Dr. Badone explained to me that although she might have originally described herself as a folklorist, she now identifies her work as being part of the realm of medical anthropology. Most recently, she has written about the state of Ontario’s Long-Term Care (LTC) system, particularly in relation to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic (Badone 2021). When I asked her how she transitioned from studying death and dying in Brittany to studying LTC in Ontario, she reflected that it was somewhat natural, suggesting that one naturally compares things in one part of the world to another. I