•  Groce, Nora E. and John W. Whiting Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language.

•  Stratton, Alison " Hard of Hearing in Sweden: Educating about and for Pathology." in Anthropological perspectives on education. Edited by H. Varenne and E. Gordon, 239-260. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press 2008 [2007]

Here comes everybody (from Ray McDermott, quoting James Joyce)

Culture (see earlier)
as
(dis-)"ability"

1. echoing Yeats on dancing

   From the (dis-) "abilities" of individual, separately bounded, bodies
   to
   
   the handicaps placed on all dancing bodies by orchestras

2. I borrow the peculiarity/particularity distinction from de Wolfe (2014). The distinction is an elaboration on McDermott and Varenne (1997) themselves elaborating one of the least remembered argument of Ruth Benedict in Patterns of Culture that, for some, the dominant ways of the people with whom they must live are actually quite difficult for them as individual participants.

   on the body, its affordances and its peculiar transformations: finding out what to do with (getting educated about) bodies differently peculiar from one's own, or from the constructions designed for particular (standardized) bodies.
   1. young bodies and their varieties
   2. sick bodies and their varieties
   3. aging bodies and their varieties
3. on the elaboration of the body and the placing of handicaps on some bodies
   1. for example: lower back pain (Walkley 2008)
      1. the organization of health (what is what doctor and what can each do? what doctor/hospital to use when? insurance)
      2. pre-diagnosis (what is it I feel? given what I feel and a need for help, where do I go?)
      3. talking the symptoms
      4. conversing with doctors, nurses, etc.
   2. and more generally all that has been caught by modern medicine
      1. including "diseases"
      2. but also all sorts of matters that could also be considered as part of "normal" development and "aging"
         1. changes in the properties ("abilities") of the body
            1. giving birth
            2. mobility
            3. vision
            4. hearing
            5. dying?
   3. another example: hearing loss: Stratton on hearing aids in Sweden (technology to which should be added the human "aides" who mediate the technology, from those who design it, to those who diagnose, fit, fund, etc. the technologies)
4. Issues in the practice of the modern medical, and particularly on all that is uncertain and must be improvised on the basis of what others do and tell (education)
   1. interaction. There is a large literature on this matter.
   2. machines, scientists and engineers. Not much literature but future work building on Latour
   3. two case studies
      1. changes in the properties ("abilities") of the body
         1. giving birth in an American hospital
            1. pain
            2. anesthetics
            3. and joking about it all (Varenne and Cotter 2006) Varenne and Cotter 2006)
         2. Stratton on hearing (change) (loss)
            1. from identification of a person as "having a problem with her hearing"
            2. to the treatment of the problem by a complex bureaucracy
            3. by way of (invisible to the patients) the identifications and practices of a crowd of specialists.
            4. to (not) wearing badly designed/engineered aids
5. Consequences: culture AS disability (McDermott & Varenne 1995)
   1. collective abilities of/for/against the person
      1. the dangers of medicalization
      2. particularly as diagnosis is made consequential for further political identification
         1. this is more than an issue of "labelling" (e.g. handicapped vs. disabled, or deaf vs. ???)
         2. it is an issue of the organization of the material practices of the collectivity
   2. from critique of customary approaches using ethnographic evidence of the production of various forms of sufferings
      1. to the efforts to maintain a status quo against ongoing resistance and thus a shift to temporal conversational processes (e.g. struggles between patients, doctors, insurance companies, drug manufacturers, employers, policy makers and politicians to find out what drug to give what patient under what conditions --- all of which over days, weeks or months of conversations that may, later, be analyzed in terms of Foucault's governmentality and the reproduction of a pattern but only at the risk of hiding all the work done by conflicting people)
      2. to the collective design of possible new normals, locally
      3. or with and for larger and larger populations: for example, insurance companies and drug manufacturers may be gaining a bigger place in health and disease management thereby producing a different America for future generations.