This link has been bookmarked by 20 people and liked by 1 people. It was first bookmarked on 19 May 2006, by Jeremy Price.
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01 Jul 14
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22 Mar 14
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29 Jan 13
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Culture is not so much a product of sharing as a product of people hammering each other into shape with the well structured tools already available. We need to think of culture as this very process of hammering a world.
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...human psychology may well provide the keyboard, but it is society which plays the tune. -
The Deprivation Approach
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We have culture, and you don't. A Nunez version would have it that:
I have eyes, and you don't. -
The Difference Approach
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We have culture, and you have a different one.
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The Culture as Disability Approach
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It takes a whole culture of people producing idealizations of what everyone should be and a system of measures for identifying those who fall short for us to forget that we collectively produce our disabilities and the discomforts that conventionally accompany them.
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19 Sep 12
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The Country of the Blind is of course wired for people who cannot see:
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the first, that we are arrogant to think we know better than people in other cultures, and the second, that we are foolish to not appreciate how much is known by others in their own terms.
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the coherence of a culture is crafted from the partial and mutually dependent knowledge of each person caught in the process and depends, in the long run, on the work they do together
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The problem in assuming that there is one way to be in a culture encourages the misunderstanding that those who are different from perceived norms are missing something, that it is their doing
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In every society, there are ways of being locked out. Race, gender, or beauty
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the powers of culture to disable
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different zones of social interaction
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suffered
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privileged
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When does a physical difference count, under what conditions, and in what ways, and for what reasons?
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the lives of those unable to do something can be either enabled or disabled by those around them.
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It is one kind of problem to have a behavioral range different from social expectations; it is another kind of problem to be in a culture in which that difference is used by others for degradation
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What if the very act of saying there is something wrong with their lives, if improperly contextualized, makes their situation worse?
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Often the very existence of the inquiry and explanation of what is wrong with their life makes things worse.
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they have to be doubly cursed and taunted by middle class researchers explaining what they do not have
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Culture, the great enabler, is disabling.
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Being in a culture is a great occasion for developing disabilities, or at least for having many people think they have disabilities.
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people in all cultures can use established cultural forms to disable each other
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Perceptions of ability organize perceptions of disability and vice versa.
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some of them difficult enough that some people are able to do them and others not.
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some achieve competence on one set of tasks and others do well on other sets of tasks.
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where cases of things not working too well are unfortunately easy to document by applying mainstream standards, there is a tendency to blame the people in the minority groups for not having enough culture to have an easier and more recognizable life.
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People are only incidentally born or early enculturated into being different. It is more important to understand how they are put into positions for being treated differently
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It takes a whole culture of people producing idealizations of what everyone should be and a system of measures for identifying those who fall short for us to forget that we collectively produce our disabilities and the discomforts that conventionally accompany them. -
One cannot be disabled alone.
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if "all men are created equal," then evidence of inequality requires the dehumanization of many.
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schooling is rich with accounts of teachers, students, administrators, and researchers disabling each other in fully cultural ways.
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school has become a primary site for the reproduction of inequality in access to resources.
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In focusing on what Adam can do, we can see that he is fine in most of his life, and it is only in response to the arbitrary demands of the school culture that he is shown to be disabled.
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- the more people believe literacy is difficult to acquire, the more they find reasons to explain why some read better than others and, correspondingly, why some do better than others in the economic and political measures of the society.
- the more people believe that literacy is cognitively and culturally transformative, the more they can find reasons to degrade those without such powers.
- and the more people believe that literacy is best learned in classrooms, the more they ignore other sources of literacy, and the more they insist on bringing back to school those who have already "failed" to develop school literacy.
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. We assumed that the exterminators were not culturally deprived as much as they might be different from those with more education and that such differences were made most manifest on standardized tests
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What is it about our culture that would have us believing that we knew better than they did?
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What is being taught is an approach to the test, not knowledge about the world.
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we were the other half of their failure.
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everyone must do better than everyone else
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the subject shifts from THEM to US, from what is wrong with them to what is wrong with the culture that history has made for all of us, from what is wrong with them to what is wrong with the history that has made a THEM separate from an US, from what is wrong with them to what is right with them that they can tell us so well about the world we have all inherited.
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07 Sep 12
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When culture is understood as the knowledge people need for living with each other, it is easy to focus on how some always appear to have more cultural knowledge than others, that some can be a part of everything and others not, that some are able and others not.
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The Deprivation Approach
This approach takes up the possibility that people in various groups develop differently enough that their members can be shown to be measurably distinct on various developmental milestones. This approach usually starts with a stable set of tasks and uses them to record varying performances across persons and cultures. Low level performances by members of a group are taken as examples of what the people of that group have not yet developed (for example, certain versions of abstraction, syllogistic reasoning, meta-contextual accounts of linguistic behavior, etc.). A crude version of this argument has it that:
We have culture, and you don't. A Nunez version would have it that:
I have eyes, and you don't. -
To unpack the assumptions underlying the argument, imagine that the world consists of a set of tasks, some of them difficult enough that some people are able to do them and others not. To make matters worse, there is a public assumption that, although society can care for those who lag behind, they are out of the running for the rewards that come with a full cultural competence.
By method and style of argument, this approach has been based mostly on psychometrics and has attracted the intuitive wrath of anthropologists who have argued that all groups, however interesting their differences, are essentially equivalent.
In the explanation of school failure, the possibility that some cultures routinely produce mature people with less development than adults in other cultures brought us the infamous cultural deprivation argument that had minority children failing in school because of impoverished and impoverishing experiences in their homes. From 1965 to 1980, much work went into making this position untenable in academic circles, but it has lived on in the common-sense most of us use to talk about school success and failure. Of late, much like the inherent intelligence and IQ bell curve foolishness
, it has seen a revival. Even anthropologists have produced a number of deprivationist descriptions, particularly in work with minorities in their own culture. -
In American social science, there is a tendency to narrow every social and cultural theory into a psychological account of the order in people's behavior. Varenne (1984) makes the case for Ruth Benedict and others. As an instance of this process, consider Bourdieu's (1977) attempt to offer a social theory of the school as the tool of contemporary institutional arrangements. His central concept, habitus, referred to early habitualization, but, in the American context, habitus has been transformed into a theory of overwhelming early socialization. This leaves us with an account of persons unsusceptible to transformation through interaction, in short, persons with qualities that keep them succeeding, or not, depending upon their first steps through social structure. This is a roundabout way of escaping society and returning to individual persons as the proximate cause of their own failure.
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The Difference Approach
This approach takes up the possibility that the ways people in different groups develop are equivalently well tuned to the demands of their cultures and, in their various ways, are equivalent paths to complete human development. This approach relies less on predefined tasks and instead focuses on the tasks performed by ordinary people, well beyond the reach of the laboratory, as a matter of course in different cultures. If it is possible to describe the task structure of varying cultures, then it is possible to discern what abilities and disabilities cultures might develop (for example, quantity estimation skills among African farmers and Baltimore milk truck dis-patchers, calculation skills among African tailors, mnemonic strategies among Micronesian navigators using the skies for direction). A crude version has it that:
We have culture, and you have a different one. Nunez does not have a difference theory, but H.G. Wells does, at least in relation to Nunez. [5]
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To unpack the assumptions underlying the argument, imagine that the world consists of a wide range of tasks and that some achieve competence on one set of tasks and others do well on other sets of tasks. Despite a liberal lament that variation is wonderful, those who cannot show the right skills at the right time in the right format are considered out of the race for the rewards of the wider culture. This approach is favored among anthropologists and ethnographically oriented psychologists, particularly those working on school problems among minorities.
In explanations of school failure, this account maintains that children from a minority cultural background mixed with teachers from a more dominant cultural background suffer enough miscommunication and alienation to give up on school, this despite the fact that they are, at least potentially, fully capable. This is by far the most popular language among anthropologists for theorizing about learning and schooling. It is closest to the anthropological instinct for talking about who are locked out of the system. Against a flood of Deprivationist thinking in the early 1960s, the Difference stand took shape to honor the lives of those who had been left out of the system and who were in turn being blamed for their failings. Where the Deprivationist saw a poverty in the language development of Black children, sociolinguists (e.g., William Labov, Roger Shuy) saw only a different dialect, grammatically as complex as any other language, and lacking nothing but the respect of mainstream speakers of English.
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Where the Deprivationist saw cognitive delays in the behavior of inner-city children, ethnographic psychologists (e.g., Michael Cole) showed how thinking was invariably complex once it was studied in relation to ongoing social situations. Where Deprivationists saw immorality and the breakdown of the family among the poor, anthropologists (e.g., Elliot Liebow, Carol Stack) found caring behavior set against a breakdown in the opportunities available in the job market. Where Deprivationists saw mayhem in classrooms, ethnographers (e.g., Frederick Erickson, Peg Griffin, Ray McDermott, Hugh Mehan) looked closely and saw tremendous order, some of it oppositional, but an order nonetheless.
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The gradual replacement of the Deprivationist stand by a Difference theory of why children from minority cultural groups fail in school represents a considerable achievement, but a temporary one. There is a delicate line that separates saying that minority children are missing enough of mainstream culture to be constantly in trouble at school and saying that minority children are missing culture period. This is a delicate tension in the cultural Difference stand, and it has been interesting how much an ethnographer with an allegiance, by way of the anthropological instinct, to appreciating children from other cultures gradually accepts mainstream criteria for measuring minority children as culturally deprived and disabled by their experience at the bottom of the cultural hierarchy.
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For example, the well crafted, ethnographic work of Shirley Brice Heath (1983) teetered delicately on a line between showing how African American children were different from mainstream expectations and showing how unfortunate they were to be so different; the tension was resolved more often than not in favor of deprivation, most obviously so in a recent paper claiming that only the barest shreds of African American culture, or any other culture, could be found in the behavior of one of her Trackton children, now grown up, moved to Atlanta, alone, with no money, a few children, and few resources with which to build an active life (Heath 1990). The problem with the anthropological instinct is that in its rush to appreciate how a culture works, it invites only an account of how the culture works well. When applied to a minority community, where cases of things not working too well are unfortunately easy to document by applying mainstream standards, there is a tendency to blame the people in the minority groups for not having enough culture to have an easier and more recognizable life. There is little appreciation in Heath's account of how, inside American social structure, being poor and destitute is one of the quite normal and ordinary ways to exist (Varenne and McDermott 1986, 1995). Being poor is a full way to be a part of American culture; it doesn't pay well, it doesn't promise much, and you have to put up with social workers and ethnographers gathering data about what you cannot do, but it is a well orchestrated way to be a member of the culture. "It is such a Bore, Being always Poor," warned Langston Hughes (1959: 131), and painful too, but it is a fully cultured position, one among a mutually well organized many.
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The Culture as Disability Approach
This approach takes up the possibility that every culture, as an historically evolved pattern of institutions, teaches people what to aspire to and hope for and marks off those who are to be noticed, handled, mistreated, and remediated as falling short. Cultures offer a wealth of positions for human beings to inhabit. Each position requires that the person inhabiting it must possess, and must be known as possessing, particular qualities that symbolize, and thereby constitute, the reality of their position to others. People are only incidentally born or early enculturated into being different. It is more important to understand how they are put into positions for being treated differently. Notice that by this approach, no group stands alone, nor even in a simple relation to more dominant other groups, but always in relation to the wider system of which all groups, dominant and minority, are a part.
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This approach starts with the question of why any culture would develop an assumedly stable set of tasks and a theory of cognitive development against which people of named different kinds might be distinguished, measured, documented, remediated, and pushed aside. On what grounds could experts have assumed that the complex worlds of individuals in multiple relationships with each other would stand still enough to be characterized by simplified accounts of either their culture, their cognition, or the ties between whatever culture and cognition are taken to be? One version of the grounds for simplicity is that such theorizing is part of wider scale institutional and political agendas, in particular, that it has been handy for the governments of modern, ideologically rationalistic, class divided, industrial, and information based states to isolate individuals as units of analysis and to record the workings of their minds for public scrutiny and control. The contemporary nation state is above all a record keeper, much more than it is a container of culture or an organizer of learning (Thomas, Meyer, Ramirez, and Boli 1988). A crude version of this approach has it that:
It takes a whole culture of people producing idealizations of what everyone should be and a system of measures for identifying those who fall short for us to forget that we collectively produce our disabilities and the discomforts that conventionally accompany them. Neither Nunez, nor H.G. Wells have such a theory. One cannot be disabled alone.
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Learning Disabilities (LD): The Case of Adam, Adam, Adam, and Adam
1. Deprivation. The school world is a set of tasks, and people who share the LD label, because there is something wrong with them, cannot perform the tasks as quickly or as well as others.
2. Difference. The school world is a set of quite arbitrary tasks not necessarily well tied to the demands of everyday life (phonics, words out of context, digit span memory), and people who share the LD label are restricted in various institutional circumstances to operating on tasks in ways that reveal their weaknesses. The performance of LD people on other kinds of tasks, or even the apparent same tasks in other circumstances, can reveal their strengths.
3. Culture as disability. The world is not a set of tasks, at least not of the type learned, or systematically not learned, at school, but made to look that way as part of political arrangements that keep people documenting each other as failures. Over the past forty years, school performance has become an exaggerated part of established political arrangements, and, by pitting all against all in a race for measurable academic achievement on arbitrary tasks, school has become a primary site for the reproduction of inequality in access to resources. The use of the term LD to describe, explain, and remediate children caught in a system of everyone having to do better than everyone else is a case in point. Even if used sensitively by people trying to do the right thing for the children apparently disabled, the term has a political life that involves millions of people operating on little information about the consequences of their work (Coles 1987 for a social history of the category and demographics; Mehan 1986, 1991, 1993; Mehan, et al, 1986 for a detailed and sophisticated account of how children are labeled).
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A group of us worked with Adam and his third and fourth grade classmates across a range of settings for over a year (Cole and Traupmann 1981; Hood, McDermott and Cole 1980; McDermott 1993). The settings included an oral test on experimental and psychometric tasks, classroom lessons, more relaxed after-school clubs, and one-on-one trips around New York City. We knew Adam well enough to notice differences in his behavior across the four settings that formed a continuum of competence, arbitrariness, and visibility:
Everyday life -----------> After-school clubs --------> Classroom groups -------------> One-to-one tests The continuum is arranged from left to right and represents an increase of either:
1. task difficulty and cognitive competence (from mastery in everyday life events, at one end, to minimal performance on test materials, on the other); 2. the arbitrariness of the task and the resources the child is allowed to use in the task performance (from everyday life, where tasks are well embedded in ongoing relations among persons and environments and one can use whatever means available to get the job done, at one end, to tasks ripped from their usual contexts and isolated specifically to measure what a child can do with them unaided by anything other than his or her mind); or
3. the social visibility, and often measurability, of the task performance (from invisible as a problem of any kind in everyday life settings to painfully and documentably noticeable on tests).
How to understand the four Adams who show up in the different contexts? Our three approaches to culture and disability offer a framework for articulating Adam's situation.
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By the Deprivation approach, Adam is part of a group of people who display particular symptoms in the face of reading and other language specific tasks. These are persons grouped together as LD. Adam is often described, by both diagnostic tests and school personnel, as having trouble paying attention and remembering words out of context. His symptoms are easily recognized, and his life in school is one of overcoming his disability. School is particularly difficult, because he is often embarrassed by what he cannot do that other children find comparatively automatic.
By the Difference stand, Adam can be understood in terms of what he cannot do only if he is also appreciated for what he can do. One way to understand the continuum of scenes along which his behavior varies is that it moves from unusually arbitrary in its demands on the child to completely open to local circumstance. At the test end of the continuum, one must face each question armed only with one's head; if Adam has to remember a string of seven digits, he cannot ask for help, look up the information, or even take time to write it down. At the other end of the continuum, in everyday life, whatever is needed to get a job done is allowable; if Adam has to remember a telephone number, he is unconstrained in how he can proceed. In focusing on what Adam can do, we can see that he is fine in most of his life, and it is only in response to the arbitrary demands of the school culture that he is shown to be disabled.
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By the Culture as disability approach, Adam must be seen in terms of the people with whom he interacts and the ways in which they structure their activities together. Such an approach delivers an account not so much of Adam, but of the people most immediately involved in the production of moments for him to be recognized as a learning problem. It turns out that all the people in his class, the teachers, of course,and all the children as well, are involved at various times in recognizing, identifying, displaying, mitigating, and even hiding what Adam is unable to do; if we include his tutors, the school psychologists, the local school of education where he goes for extra help (and his teachers for their degrees), if we include the researchers who show up to study him and the government agencies that finance them, the number of people found contributing to Adam being highlighted as LD grows large. If we add all the children who do well at school because Adam and others like him fail standardized tests, then most of the country is involved in Adam being LD. We use the term culture for the arrangements that allow so many people to be involved in Adam's being LD, for it emphasizes that, whatever problems Adam may have in his head, whether due originally to genetic or early socialization oddities, these would have had a different impact on his relationships with others if the culture he inhabits did not focus so relentlessly on individual success and failure. The culture that promises equality of opportunity while institutionalizing opportunities for less than half of the people to be successful in school is a culture that invites a category, LD, and its systematic application within the educational system. Adam is a display board for the problems of the system.
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Culture as Disab
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Culture is not so much a product of sharing as a product of people hammering each other into shape with the well structured tools already available.
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We need to think of culture as this very process of hammering a world.
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This approach takes up the possibility that people in various groups develop differently enough that their members can be shown to be measurably distinct on various developmental milestones.
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This approach relies less on predefined tasks and instead focuses on the tasks performed by ordinary people
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We have culture, and you have a different one.
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this account maintains that children from a minority cultural background mixed with teachers from a more dominant cultural background suffer enough miscommunication and alienation to give up on school
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This approach takes up the possibility that every culture, as an historically evolved pattern of institutions, teaches people what to aspire to and hope for and marks off those who are to be noticed, handled, mistreated, and remediated as falling short.
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It takes a whole culture of people producing idealizations of what everyone should be and a system of measures for identifying those who fall short for us to forget that we collectively produce our disabilities and the discomforts that conventionally accompany them.
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Social analysis shows that being labeled often invites a public response that multiplies the difficulties facing the seemingly unable.
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Everyone in any culture is subject to being labeled and disabled.
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we are arrogant to think we know better than people in other cultures, and the second, that we are foolish to not appreciate how much is known by others in their own terms
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Not only is our wisdom not total, there is yet much to be learned from others
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it is made of the voices of many, each one brought to life and made significant by the others, only sometimes by being the same, more often by being different, more dramatically by being contradictory.
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Culture is not so much a product of sharing as a product of people hammering each other into shape with the well structured tools already available. We need to think of culture as this very process of hammering a world.
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Race, gender, or beauty can serve as the dividing point as easily as being sighted or blind.
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A disability may be a better display board for the weaknesses of a cultural system than it is an account of real persons.
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Consideration of how such small matters can be turned into a source of social isolation and exclusion is a good way to ask about the nature of culture as disability.
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"suffering" blindness is minimal compared to "suffering" the depression that follows the recovery of vision (Gregory and Wallace 1963).
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A fact is like a sack which won't stand up when it is empty. In order that it may stand up, one has to put into it the reason and sentiment which have caused it to exist.
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This effort is an improvement over the blame the victim approach and has the advantage of self-criticism in the acknowledgment that the world given to them, the part that does not work for them in school, includes everyone involved in constructing "School" in America: school personnel, of course, and parents, and let us not forget the philosophers, curriculum designers, textbook publishers, testers, and educational researchers, including anthropologists, in other words, "US."
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Perceptions of ability organize perceptions of disability and vice versa.
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No ability, no disability. No disability, no ability.
Nunez could not explain to the people in the Country of the Blind that they were Blind:
No sightedness, no blindness. -
The Deprivation Approach
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This approach takes up the possibility that people in various groups develop differently enough that their members can be shown to be measurably distinct on various developmental milestones.
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We have culture, and you don't. A Nunez version would have it that:
I have eyes, and you don't. -
The Difference Approach
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This approach takes up the possibility that the ways people in different groups develop are equivalently well tuned to the demands of their cultures and, in their various ways, are equivalent paths to complete human development.
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We have culture, and you have a different one.
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The Culture as Disability Approach
This approach takes up the possibility that every culture, as an historically evolved pattern of institutions, teaches people what to aspire to and hope for and marks off those who are to be noticed, handled, mistreated, and remediated as falling short.
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This approach starts with the question of why any culture would develop an assumedly stable set of tasks and a theory of cognitive development against which people of named different kinds might be distinguished, measured, documented, remediated, and pushed aside.
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without a money system, there is no debt;
without a kinship system, no orphans;
without a class system, no deprivation;
without schools, no learning disabilities;
without a working concept of truth, no liars;
without eloquence, no inarticulateness. -
Even if used sensitively by people trying to do the right thing for the children apparently disabled, the term has a political life that involves millions of people operating on little information about the consequences of their work
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The continuum is arranged from left to right and represents an increase of either:
1. task difficulty and cognitive competence (from mastery in everyday life events, at one end, to minimal performance on test materials, on the other); 2. the arbitrariness of the task and the resources the child is allowed to use in the task performance (from everyday life, where tasks are well embedded in ongoing relations among persons and environments and one can use whatever means available to get the job done, at one end, to tasks ripped from their usual contexts and isolated specifically to measure what a child can do with them unaided by anything other than his or her mind); or
3. the social visibility, and often measurability, of the task performance (from invisible as a problem of any kind in everyday life settings to painfully and documentably noticeable on tests).
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culture is an account of the world built over centuries for people to inhabit, to employ, to celebrate, and to contest.
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06 Sep 12
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Culture is not so much a product of sharing as a product of people hammering each other into shape with the well structured tools already available.
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as if stereotyping is a worthy practice as long as it is done by professionals.
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A disability may be a better display board for the weaknesses of a cultural system than it is an account of real persons.
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It is about the powers of culture to disable.
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When does a physical difference count, under what conditions, and in what ways, and for what reasons?
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A fact is like a sack which won't stand up when it is empty. In order that it may stand up, one has to put into it the reason and sentiment which have caused it to exist.
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This approach takes up the possibility that people in various groups develop differently enough that their members can be shown to be measurably distinct on various developmental milestones
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In the explanation of school failure, the possibility that some cultures routinely produce mature people with less development than adults in other cultures brought us the infamous cultural deprivation argument that had minority children failing in school because of impoverished and impoverishing experiences in their homes. From 1965 to 1980, much work went into making this position untenable in academic circles, but it has lived on in the common-sense most of us use to talk about school success and failure. Of late, much like the inherent intelligence and IQ bell curve foolishness, it has seen a revival. Even anthropologists have produced a number of deprivationist descriptions, particularly in work with minorities in their own culture.
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This is a roundabout way of escaping society and returning to individual persons as the proximate cause of their own failure.
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imagine that the world consists of a wide range of tasks and that some achieve competence on one set of tasks and others do well on other sets of tasks.
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n explanations of school failure, this account maintains that children from a minority cultural background mixed with teachers from a more dominant cultural background suffer enough miscommunication and alienation to give up on school, this despite the fact that they are, at least potentially, fully capable.
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Where the Deprivationist saw a poverty in the language development of Black children, sociolinguists (e.g., William Labov, Roger Shuy) saw only a different dialect, grammatically as complex as any other language,
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When applied to a minority community, where cases of things not working too well are unfortunately easy to document by applying mainstream standards, there is a tendency to blame the people in the minority groups for not having enough culture to have an easier and more recognizable life.
-
It is more important to understand how they are put into positions for being treated differently
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t takes a whole culture of people producing idealizations of what everyone should be and a system of measures for identifying those who fall short for us to forget that we collectively produce our disabilities and the discomforts that conventionally accompany them.
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Competence is a fabrication, a mock-up, and people caught in America work hard to take their place in any hierarchy of competence displays. Being acquired by a position in a culture is difficult and unending work. The most arbitrary tasks can be the measure of individual development. Not only are cultures occasions for disabilities, they actively organize ways for persons to be disabled.
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racism is a correlate of liberal democracy: if "all men are created equal," then evidence of inequality requires the dehumanization of many.
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We might just as well say that culture fashions problems for us and, from the same sources, expects us to construct solutions. It is from life inside this trap that we often get the feeling that working on problems can make things worse.
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Over the past forty years, school performance has become an exaggerated part of established political arrangements, and, by pitting all against all in a race for measurable academic achievement on arbitrary tasks, school has become a primary site for the reproduction of inequality in access to resources.
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everyone having to do better than everyone else is a case in point
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School is particularly difficult, because he is often embarrassed by what he cannot do that other children find comparatively automatic.
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an be understood in terms of what he cannot do only if he is also appreciated for what he can do
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In focusing on what Adam can do, we can see that he is fine in most of his life, and it is only in response to the arbitrary demands of the school culture that he is shown to be disabled.
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The culture that promises equality of opportunity while institutionalizing opportunities for less than half of the people to be successful in school is a culture that invites a category, LD, and its systematic application within the educational system. Adam is a display board for the problems of the system.
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We were in effect disabled when it came to seeing the knowledge base of the exterminators?
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What is being taught is an approach to the test, not knowledge about the world.
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Tests went by a different and, in terms of exterminator practice, a quite arbitrary standard of precision.
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If social structuring processes in America must be fed by repeated identifications of failure in school and school-like institutions, then American education will continue acquiring people for its positions of failure. America will have its disabilities.
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Conclusion
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Conclusion
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Conclusion
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Conclusion
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Conclusion
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Culture as Disability
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RAY McDERMOTT and HERVÉ VARENNE
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RVÉ VARENNE
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we are arrogant to think we know better than people in other cultures
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we are foolish to not appreciate how much is known by others in their own terms
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The Cultural Construction of Disability
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Making Disabilities in American Education
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Three Ways of Thinking about Culture and Disability
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The Deprivation Approach
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The Difference Approach
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The Culture as Disability Approach
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Examples of the Acquisition of Persons by Culturally Fabricated Disabilities
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Learning Disabilities (LD): The Case of Adam, Adam, Adam, and Adam
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The Illiterate: The Case of Exterminating Literacy
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1. Deprivation. The world is a text, and some people know how to read better than others. The illiterate are missing much of what they need to get around the world, and, as a culture and an economy, we are being weighed down with unproductive workers who cannot read. That a high percentage of illiterate persons are in minority groups with a wide range of other problems shows what happens to people who cannot read and write in the modern world.
2. Difference. Literacy is a complex term covering a wide range of activities that differ from one context or culture to another. Its role in different societies, indeed, in our society, can vary quite remarkably, and it is not at all clear that it has positive or even uniform effects on a people, their ways of thinking, or their modes of production.
3. Culture as disability. Illiteracy is a recent term in our lives; it was introduced in England about a century ago and has been gathering increasing attention to the point where now just about any shift in the definition can leave different portions of the population outside its attributive powers, e.g., the computer or mathematical illiterate. The circumstances of the application of the term illiteracy to persons then and now have been intensely political more than pedagogical or remedial (Donald 1983; Smith 1986). The fundamental and powerful assumptions of our culture are that:
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Conclusion
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05 Sep 12
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anthropology in this century. First we are told of another culture, far away and isolated, and then we are asked to appreciate how smart and well adapted the people in the other culture are
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Culture is not so much a product of sharing as a product of people hammering each other into shape with the well structured tools already available.
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as if stereotyping is a worthy practice as long as it is done by professionals.
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we can offer a reformulation of the problems involved.
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we claim that disabilities are approached best as a cultural fabrication
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focus on the recent popularity of disabilities in the United States
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identify three ways in which theories of culture and theories of disability have been similarly formulated
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offer a version of how two fairly new disabilities--learning disabilities and illiteracy--have been institutionalized as an active part of American education.
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show their relevance to currently popular accounts of school failure
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Consideration of how such small matters can be turned into a source of social isolation and exclusion is a good way to ask about the nature of culture as disability.
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When does a physical difference count, under what conditions, and in what ways, and for what reasons?
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A more principled account of life inside a labeled/disabled community would show, for example, that the abjection with which so-called normals approach labeled/-disabled people is one-sided and distorting
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It is one kind of problem to have a behavioral range different from social expectations; it is another kind of problem to be in a culture in which that difference is used by others for degradation.
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There seems to be no end to the ways a child can be called culturally different, and over the last decade just about any recognizable behavior has been cited as an instance of a cultural difference.
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Culture, the great enabler, is disabling
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Being in a culture may be the only road to enhancement; it is also very dangerous.
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those who are degraded make possible the perceived purity of those momentarily spared. Perceptions of ability organize perceptions of disability and vice versa.
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Those who did not do well lived their lives outside of school without having to notice any particular lack in themselves. With or without school, people proceeded to a life of recording, filing, repairing, and selling,
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this approach has been based mostly on psychometrics and has attracted the intuitive wrath of anthropologists who have argued that all groups, however interesting their differences, are essentially equivalent.
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habitualization,
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socialization
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less on predefined tasks and instead focuses on the tasks performed by ordinary people
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teaches people what to aspire to and hope for
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and marks off those who are to be noticed, handled, mistreated, and remediated as falling short
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Instances of Culture as Disability may be ubiquitous, but analyses are rare.
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Deprivation.
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Difference.
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restricted in various institutional circumstances to operating on tasks in ways that reveal their weaknesses
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Culture as disability
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School is particularly difficult, because he is often embarrassed by what he cannot do that other children find comparatively automatic.
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in terms of what he cannot do only if he is also appreciated for what he can do.
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we can see that he is fine in most of his life, and it is only in response to the arbitrary demands of the school culture that he is shown to be disabled.
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the teachers, of course,and all the children as well, are involved at various times in recognizing, identifying, displaying, mitigating, and even hiding what Adam is unable to do
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, these would have had a different impact on his relationships with others if the culture he inhabits did not focus so relentlessly on individual success and failure
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to explain why some read better than others and, correspondingly, why some do better than others in the economic and political measures of the society.
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They mobilized their community both in the classroom and beyond.
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By breaking through the constant threat of failure, they were reorganizing their access to school knowledge and simultaneously they were showing us how much we were the other half of their failure.
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American education will continue acquiring people for its positions of failure.
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rethinking the terms culture and disability.
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culture is not a property of individuals-as-conditioned; rather culture is an account of the world built over centuries for people to inhabit, to employ, to celebrate, and to contest
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subject shifts from THEM to US, from what is wrong with them to what is wrong with the culture that history has made for all of us, from what is wrong with them to what is wrong with the history that has made a THEM separate from an US, from what is wrong with them to what is right with them that they can tell us so well about the world we have all inherited.
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The story reads like much anthropology in this century. First we are told of another culture, far away and isolated, and then we are asked to appreciate how smart and well adapted the people in the other culture are. It is the anthropologist's ideal setting for making t
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gy in this century. First we are told of another culture, far away and isolated, and then we are asked to appreciate how smart an
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we are arrogant to think we know better than people in other cultures
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Instead, the coherence of a culture is crafted from the partial and mutually dependent knowledge of each person caught in the process and depends, in the long run, on the work they do together.
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Culture is not so much a product of sharing as a product of people hammering each other into shape with the well structured tools already available.
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When culture is understood as the knowledge people need for living with each othe
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Race, gender, or beauty can serve as the dividing point as easily as being sighted or blind.
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It is about the powers of culture to disable
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Although it was definitely the case the Vineyard deaf could not hear, it is also the case they had the means to turn not hearing into something that everyone in the community could easily work with, work around, and turn into a strength
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When does a physical difference count, under what conditions, and in what ways, and for what reasons
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the lives of those unable to do something can be either enabled or disabled by those around them
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What if the very act of saying there is something wrong with their lives, if improperly contextualized, makes their situation worse
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Instead of focusing on what is wrong inside the child, the second effort focuses on what is wrong outside the child in the world we give them
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an improvement over the blame the victim approach and has the advantage of self-criticism
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American education has numerous made-to-order general categories for describing children in trouble, for example: deprived, different, disadvantaged, at risk, disabled
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Culture, the great enabler, is disabling
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but every culture, we must acknowledge, also gives, often daily and eventually always, a blind side, a deaf ear, a learning problem, and a physical handicap
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At the most general level, people in all cultures can use established cultural forms to disable each other
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This is a roundabout way of escaping society and returning to individual persons as the proximate cause of their own failure
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This approach takes up the possibility that the ways people in different groups develop are equivalently well tuned to the demands of their cultures and, in their various ways, are equivalent paths to complete human development
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focuses on the tasks performed by ordinary people
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We have culture, and you have a different one
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In explanations of school failure, this account maintains that children from a minority cultural background mixed with teachers from a more dominant cultural background suffer enough miscommunication and alienation to give up on school, this despite the fact that they are, at least potentially, fully capable
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there is a tendency to blame the people in the minority groups for not having enough culture to have an easier and more recognizable life.
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Being poor is a full way to be a part of American culture; it doesn't pay well, it doesn't promise much, and you have to put up with social workers and ethnographers gathering data about what you cannot do, but it is a well orchestrated way to be a member of the culture.
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It takes a whole culture of people producing idealizations of what everyone should be and a system of measures for identifying those who fall short for us to forget that we collectively produce our disabilities and the discomforts that conventionally accompany them.
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if "all men are created equal," then evidence of inequality requires the dehumanization of many
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without a money system, there is no debt;
without a kinship system, no orphans;
without a class system, no deprivation;
without schools, no learning disabilities;
without a working concept of truth, no liars;
without eloquence, no inarticulateness. -
In the union classes, the men used "their" culture to run the classrooms, and they had a way of talking to each other that outsiders might not have managed well
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For a moment, they hid their possible difference in the privacy of their own assemblies and presented themselves as not different.
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culture is not a property of individuals-as-conditioned; rather culture is an account of the world built over centuries for people to inhabit, to employ, to celebrate, and to contest
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08 Mar 12
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Over the past forty years, there has been developing in the United States a system of categorization that limits us to only two ways for a person to be. One way is to have been classified, occasionally remediated, and often mistreated as disabled. The other way is to be temporarily a half step ahead of being classified, remediated, and mistreated as disabled. The cultural ascription of disability is an occasional and monumental event in most lives, and the members of our culture, at their worst and, horrors, at their most cultured, have been actively making the ascription of disability a constant event in the lives of an increasing number of persons. [4]
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...for every society, the relation between normal and special modes of behavior is one of complementarity. That is obvious in the case of shamanism and spirit possession; but it would be no less true of modes of behavior which our own society refuses to group and legitimize as vocations. For there are individuals who, for social, historical, or physiological reasons (it does not much matter which), are sensitive to the contradictions and gaps in the social structure; and our society hands over to those individuals the task of realizing a statistical equivalent (by constituting that compliment, 'abnormality', which alone can supply a definition of 'the normal'). Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction a l'oeuvre de Marcel Mauss (1950)
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The Culture as Disability Approach
This approach takes up the possibility that every culture, as an historically evolved pattern of institutions, teaches people what to aspire to and hope for and marks off those who are to be noticed, handled, mistreated, and remediated as falling short. Cultures offer a wealth of positions for human beings to inhabit. Each position requires that the person inhabiting it must possess, and must be known as possessing, particular qualities that symbolize, and thereby constitute, the reality of their position to others. People are only incidentally born or early enculturated into being different. It is more important to understand how they are put into positions for being treated differently. Notice that by this approach, no group stands alone, nor even in a simple relation to more dominant other groups, but always in relation to the wider system of which all groups, dominant and minority, are a part.
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It takes a whole culture of people producing idealizations of what everyone should be and a system of measures for identifying those who fall short for us to forget that we collectively produce our disabilities and the discomforts that conventionally accompany them.
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culture refers to an organization of hopes and dreams about how the world should be. The same people, using the same materials and in ways systematically related to our hopes and dreams, also give us our problems.
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We might just as well say that culture fashions problems for us and, from the same sources, expects us to construct solutions.
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08 Feb 12
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By established cultural forms, we mean anything from built physical structures that leave people locked out of public places, through bad school assessment systems that keep people from learning what is in some way needed, on to metaphors and tropes that deliver so consistently a view of people as less than they are.
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In explanations of school failure, this account maintains that children from a minority cultural background mixed with teachers from a more dominant cultural background suffer enough miscommunication and alienation to give up on school, this despite the fact that they are, at least potentially, fully capable.
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This approach takes up the possibility that every culture, as an historically evolved pattern of institutions, teaches people what to aspire to and hope for and marks off those who are to be noticed, handled, mistreated, and remediated as falling short. Cultures offer a wealth of positions for human beings to inhabit.
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12 Mar 10
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02 Feb 08
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30 Jan 07
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19 May 06
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Common sense allows that persons unable to handle a difficult problem can be labeled "disabled." Social analysis shows that being labeled often invites a public response that multiplies the difficulties facing the seemingly unable. Cultural analysis shows that disability refers most precisely to inadequate performances only on tasks that are arbitrarily circumscribed from daily life. Disabilities are less the property of persons than they are moments in a cultural focus. Everyone in any culture is subject to being labeled and disabled.
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