This is the eighth in a series of notes to lectures for my class ITSF4010 "Cultural & Social Bases of Education" ( )

• Goodwin, Charles "A Competent Speaker Who Can't Speak: The Social Life of Aphasia." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14, 2:151-170. 2004

1. Culture vs. the individual
   1. Benedict in Patterns of culture puzzling about what happens to an individual when their personality (as they are born with or developed) does not "fit" the dominant forms of displays of personality
   2. Henry in Culture against Man making the case that some patterns for public displays of personality(for example in an American high school) make life difficult for some, if not many.
2. Handicap? or disability? affordance or construction?
   1. given the (dis-)ability of a body to do what other (adult, in good health) bodies can easily do (e.g. open a door), is this a matter of
      1. a physical (deafness, blindness, age, etc) condition
      2. a psychological (retardation, inability to talk, etc) condition
   2. the extra weight (handicap) that may be put on a body because of design choices by other people (e.g. stairs, right-handed objects, etc.)
3. The rise and fall of diagnoses for psychological conditions
   1. "histeria," common diagnosis for women in the 19th century is now highly deprecated
   2. "dyslexia" is discovered in the 1930s (perhaps because the children of powerful people could not pass exams now required for entry into their rank)
   3. "autism" is discovered
   4. "asperger" is discovered
   5. the number of people diagnosed "with schyzophrenia" has dropped a people who might have been diagnosed with it are now diagnosed as "with autism" (Eyal 2010)
   6. current controversies about segmenting the "autism" spectrum for the more severe cases to receive more State support.
4. Cross-cultural variation in symptoms and other ethnographic evidence
   1. anorexia in Hong Kong (Lee, Sing 1996)
   2. Goodwin on communication with a person with aphasia
5. The rise of "disability studies" in anthropology and beyond
   1. McDermott and Varenne on "culture as disability" (1995)
   2. the materiality of body abilities or their "affordances" (peculiarities) which might be used to enable (e.g. Goodwin's case)
   3. that which is made by some people with rhetorical, artistic, or political power. (particularities)