Review of Books: Scholars Without Borders, Seeking People Beyond Bounds
Review by N.D. Wyteman (ndwyteman@aol.com)
Jane HUBERT (ed.) (2000) Madness, Disability and Social Exclusion. The archaeology and anthropology of 'difference'. London & New York: Routledge. xvii + 252 pp. isbn 0415230020
Rab HOUSTON & Uta FRITH (2000) Autism in History: the case of Hugh Blair of Borgue. Oxford: Blackwell. ix + 207 pp. isbn 0631220895
Cross-, trans-, inter- and perhaps ultra- disciplinary studies have become increasingly common in pursuit of large goals, such as planning cities or reconstructing human history. These two books arise from the large and difficult goal of reaching a better understanding of difference and otherness, in people at or beyond the margins of acceptability in various communities or societies. The first is a collection of conference papers, ranging across Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa, bringing together archaeologists, anthropologists and people working in the mental disability field. The second book focuses on a single historical case of mental disability in Scotland, using perspectives from history, psychiatry, law and psychology that are seldom thus combined.
Complexities
Introducing her collection, Jane Hubert underlines the "complexity of boundedness and exclusion" and the many levels at which these can operate in widely differing societies at different times. The available evidence from archaeology is usually equivocal (to put it mildly), but the bones very seldom rise up to disagree. Hubert rightly cites the sceptical anthropologist Katherine Dettwyler, questioning some archaeologists' reading-back of 'compassion' into heaps of prehistoric bones. [1] Social anthropologists' findings are at least open to scrutiny by some of the people on whom they report. Mental health professionals have begun to be challenged more vigorously in recent decades by people who dismiss any question about their own competence to judge: 'I may be mad, but I'm not stupid!'
At an academic level, this book is about the uses and misuses of different sorts of evidence, the spaces and incentives for the researcher's insights and intuition, tempered by the critical appraisal of colleagues and laypersons. The chapters vary in the degree to which they achieve a fair balance. Hubert's mostly well-balanced introduction twice slips into the incautious use of "X shows Y", reporting e.g. that Kathryn Hollins (chapter 13) "shows that current British society is creating a new category of socially excluded children -- as a result of an advance in medical technology" (p. 3). More accurately, Hollins is taking a campaign stance on cochlear implants for deaf infants. It is hardly "current British society" that is creating a new category. The battle, labels and categories have been generated by a small number of surgical and medical professionals and Deaf campaigners.
Varieties
To sample the archaeological side: Charlotte Roberts (pp. 46-59) introduces the varied meanings of disability, and some ways in which evidence is identified and interpreted for ancient disease and disability. This chapter inadvertently illustrates a common problem of cross-disciplinary studies -- the paleopathology material, which is the author's speciality, receives suitable care, but the section on "Evidence of attitudes, treatment and care" makes some incautious historical assertions, citing a popularising work largely based on secondary sources. Jonathan Tubb (pp. 81-86) describes the skeletal remains of two people who probably had disabilities in the 18th and 15th centuries BC, suggesting how and why they were unrecognised or misinterpreted in classifications by earlier archaeologists. David Jeffreys & John Tait (pp. 87-95) give a brief and suitably cautious review of evidence on social responses to disability and disabled persons in the social and religious context of Egyptian antiquity, for which archaeological sources are "plentiful but often ambivalent".
Anthropological chapters include a report by Patrick Devlieger (pp. 159-67) based on ethnographic studies in the Kasai region of the Congo. He explores some of the meanings of infant disability, infanticide, and of conflicts with the former colonial state. Jeanette Hyland (pp. 168-79) reports with case histories from an area of Nepal where studies in 1980 and 1990 suggested the presence of a multi-layered range of beliefs about leprosy causation, and expectations about the place of people with leprosy in isolation from the community. Efforts to replace traditional views with ideas based on western allopathic medicine had little or no practical impact. The familiar effect was noticed, that some local people added an apparently incompatible foreign view to their existing repertoire of possible explanations. Murray Last (pp. 217-39) describes several aspects of 'social exclusion' as applied both to people with disabilities and to those with other forms of difference or low status in northern Nigeria, from pre-colonial times through to the present, emphasizing the complexities of such studies.
For the past decade Lois Bragg of Gallaudet University has been quarrying medieval Celtic, English and Nordic literature, producing a range of fascinating material on disabled characters, as a counterpart to her Deaf studies and linguistic interests in North America. Digging here (pp. 128-43) in the Icelandic Family Sagas might be regarded as a form of archaeology with anthropological interpretations. The disabled or different characters have even less chance to stand up and argue with their investigator than the heaps of bones in caves! Furthermore, these characters are hardly placed beyond the margins, by their literary progenitors. Disability and disfigurement are "evenly distributed along the social scale, and often attach to saga heroes" (p. 129). The number represented in the literature with serious disabilities "is so large and varied as almost to constitute the rule rather than the exception", apparently in keeping with the incidence of disability among male gods (pp. 129-30). The idea that disability has always and everywhere been something concealed, minimised, ignored or down-trodden, is fine as a modern western campaign slogan, so long as it is not mistaken for a global finding of historical studies.
Autism and Social Expectation
Cross-disciplinary collaboration in Hubert's collection of papers seems to have relied mostly on the incidental propinquity of conferencing. In contrast, Houston and Frith's book, attempting to prove that the mental incapacity of Scottish (un)gentleman Hugh Blair (c. 1708-1765) would now be diagnosed as autism, is specifically advertised as "the result of a unique collaboration between a social historian and a cognitive scientist". While authors are seldom to blame for the hype on the cover, the book's contents often have a similarly journalistic tone and cliché-ridden mentality. The authors assert that, "Our challenge is to reconstruct the mind of an unusual person from fragments of information salvaged from ancient legal papers" (pp. 4-5). In common English usage, the "reconstruction" of someone's mind is not a feasible activity. The "fragments" available are elsewhere (p. 12) described as "source materials which altogether amount to approximately 100,000 words, some 15,000 of which are depositions." (Some fragments...) These source materials were not "salvaged", they were parts of numbered legal records consulted in the National Archives of Scotland (p. 177). The case concerning the mental capacity of Hugh Blair of Borgue occurred in 1747, so the documents are hardly "ancient".
The tale told by Houston and Frith certainly has many points of interest, yet the telling is marred by further exaggerations and naive assertions that reduce credibility. "From a historian's point of view, it is necessary to accept the judgement of Hugh's contemporaries that he was (in their words) an idiot" (p. 4). Is it necessary? Must the historian believe any contemporary view on record? Elsewhere, Houston and Firth note that some witnesses did not wish to assert that Hugh Blair was an idiot (p. 57). The authors also suggest that the criteria of mental incapacity in Hugh Blair were significantly different from those found in other court cases where people were found to be idiots (p. 149). So whose judgement is the historian obliged to accept? Houston, who is a history professor and co-editor of an historical series, may have some other meaning in mind. Perhaps he is simplifying and popularising, so that the cognitive scientists won't run away from the severities of historiography! The court business described in the book fell entirely in the first half of the 18th century, and Houston lists the reigning monarchs, George I and George II. Yet he can't resist going on to state that, "George III, who became king in 1760, was, of course, 'mad'" (p. 18). Of course? Does this contribute to understanding autism and the case of Hugh Blair? Was George III always 'mad'? (No, he was not). Was George III considered either an idiot or autistic? (No, even when he suffered some months of mental illness 28 years after becoming king, he was not reduced to idiocy, and showed no autistic behaviour). George III's 'madness' seems to be there merely as another 'amazing fact' to titillate the voyeur.
It is fair to record that reviewers as distinguished as Oliver Sacks have found Houston & Frith's book readable and convincing, and seem to have passed over the irritations. It does give a useful idea of the kind and extent of work involved in a certain sort of disability history research. The cross-disciplinary work is commendable in its intention. Yet the result suggests that there can be disadvantages as well as benefits.
[1] K.A. Dettwyler (1991) Can paleopathology provide evidence of "compassion"? American J. Physical Anthropology 84: 375-84. This gives a sceptical view of interpretations of the bones of 'Shanidar I', a male adult Mesopotamian dating to the Middle Paleolithic period. Injuries suggest that his right arm was paralysed, and he may have been partly blind. Romantic reconstructions of his life (and of some similar skeletons) are unscientific and may be based on writers' misconceptions about disablement.
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