Ben Kasstan, our blog reviews editor and PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Durham has won the 2014 Margaret Clark award competition sponsored by the Association for Anthropology and Gerontology. This award supports the continued pursuit of work following the example of Margaret Clark, a pioneer in the multidisciplinary study of socio-cultural gerontology and medical anthropology, and a scholar committed to mentoring younger colleagues. Ben submitted his Wellcome-funded MSc Medical Anthropology dissertation which was based on research with a community of Shoah survivors. The US-based judge’s comments were:
I like this essay. I think trauma, survival, memory as manifest in food (daily experience) and notions of (and experiences of) aging/death are really important for us to understand. So, I am interested in the particular Shoah story, but also in what this helps us understand about communities of trauma in relation to experiences of aging more generally. This is a great anthropological topic. The paper does an excellent job in writing clearly and incorporating his fieldwork and the theoretical work of others as well as published work by Holocaust survivors. I liked how the author interwove his fieldwork data with work from survivors’ published narratives. It is a strong ethnography that both educates a reader on a story but also has an important theoretical contribution. Great use of research subjects’ quotes, great description of the center, great use of the work of other scholars. It will need to be revised as a publishable paper for inclusion in Anthropology & Aging, but this author seems well-equipped for that process.
Congratulations to Ben on winning this prestigious award and we look forward to the paper!