Daphne Berdahl Memorial Lecture
Abstract: In this lecture, Janelle Taylor describes her recent research on dementia and caregiving, with attention to resonances with questions and themes from Daphne Berdahl’s groundbreaking research on German reunification. Like Berdahl’s work, this research adapts and extends ethnographic approaches, to examine how people experience and navigate the new social realities emerging in the context of large-scale changes. For Taylor, this has meant analyzing existing data and documents to explore the lives and social relations of the growing number of older adults who, in the context of population aging, are without a living spouse or children at the time they develop dementia. The lecture concludes with some reflections on aging, loss, and memory as dimensions of disciplinarity continuity in anthropology.
Please register in advance of the event at z.umn.edu/BerdahlLecture2023 by April 7 at noon so that we can ensure adequate catering.
The Daphne Berdahl Memorial Lecture is held annually to commemorate the life and scholarship of Professor Daphne Berdahl (1964-2007). Professor Berdahl wrote extensively on borders and borderlands, consumption and citizenship, the politics of memory, and post-socialist transitions. She is best known for her book Where the World Ended, a study of the transformations of everyday life in a village on the east side of the east-west German border immediately after the collapse of the socialist state and German reunification. She also co-edited Altered States, a collection of studies of post-socialist societies in Europe and co-edited the Indiana University Press book series on New Anthropologies of Europe. The Berdahl Lecture series seeks to explore themes resonant in Professor Berdahl's work.