Autismo 1

Introduction

Autism: Rethinking the Possibilities

Olga SolomonNancy Bagatell

Abstract This special issue of Ethos brings together the work of scholars from multiple disciplines including

anthropology, occupational science, and education. The authors share two main goals. First, this interdisciplinary

collection of articles highlights the importance of rethinking research on autism. Each article encourages move-

ment away from dominant biomedical discourses that focus largely on symptoms to a more phenomenological and

ethnographic stance that addresses experiences of living with autism. The second goal is to rethink possibilities for

social interaction and participation for people with autism. In this introduction, we briefly review current biomedical

accounts of autism as a disorder that affects social cognition and explore the importance of rethinking these

assumptions. We suggest that this discussion is particularly well suited for psychological anthropology’s concerns

with the psychological and the social in an individual’s experience and place in society. [autism, ethnographic re-

search, intersubjectivity, neurodiversity, sociality]

This special issue of Ethos, ‘‘Rethinking Autism, Rethinking Anthropology,’’ has two goals.

First, the articles and commentaries encourage scholars to rethink the possibilities for

research on autism from an interdisciplinary, social science perspective. The second goal is

to rethink the possibilities of social engagement for those affected by autism, their family

members, therapists, and others. Such a perspective is steadfastly ethnographic, and it

resonates with psychological anthropology’s concerns with interconnections between the

psychological and the social in an individual’s experience and position in society.

Beginning with its anthropological origins in Malinowski’s (1961) Argonauts in the Western

Pacific, ethnography has been used to document and understand the Other. ‘‘Like translation,’’

Vincent Crapanzano (1986:51) writes, ‘‘ethnography is a . . . somewhat provisional way of coming

to terms with the foreignness of . . . cultures and societies.’’ Many preceding ethnographic enter-

prises, Mary Louise Pratt (1986) reminds us, defined themselves against adjacent and antecedent

discourses to ‘‘usurp their authority and correct their abuses’’ (Pratt 1986:27), especially when

these abuses involved describing ‘‘the native as a distorted, childish caricature of a human being’’

(Malinowski 1961:11).

The ethnographic enterprise of describing and understanding autism faces a similar chal-

lenge; grappling with the dominant biomedical discourse that casts symptoms of autism and

their consequences for individuals and their families in a categorically deficit-based frame-

work. Keeping in line with the experience-near (Geertz 1973) orientation to the study

Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology

AUTISM: RETHINKING THE POSSIBILITIES 1

ETHOS, Vol. 38, Issue 1, pp. 1–7, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. & 2010 by the American AnthropologicalAssociation. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1352.2009.01078.x.

of social behavior across cultures, the ethnographic studies presented in this issue seek to

rethink and reimagine autism from a phenomenological, rather than a biomedical, point

of view.

Interdisciplinary ethnographic studies on autism are especially timely now that neuro-

science has transitioned from the ‘‘Decade of the Brain’’ (e.g., Andreasen 2001)1 into the

new millennium that began with the completed sequencing of human genome and the

beginning of functional genomics (e.g., Collins and McKusick 2001). Basic research on

autism has been influenced by this scientific direction as evidenced in biomedical attempts

to capture the heterogeneity in sociocommunicative and cognitive manifestations of autism

in purely genetic terms. Consequently, there is less and less attention in autism research

to phenomena that cannot be studied at the neurobiological or molecular level, such as

human experience, social interaction, and cross-cultural variation. This situation is made

even more complex by the expanding boundaries of the autism spectrum and its increasing

prevalence. With medical anthropologist Byron Good (1997), we believe that, ‘‘the behav-

ioral sciences in general, and cross-cultural and ethnographic studies in particular, have

become more rather than less important’’ (Good 1997:230) at the present time. It is this

perspective that makes the special issue particularly relevant to the contemporary state of

autism research.

Moreover, although biomedicine claims ‘‘culture-free’’ objectivity, it is subject to culturally

and institutionally organized practices of imagination and interpretation (DelVecchio Good

2007). Yet the images and interpretations of autism produced by these practices are cast

as objective truths and permeate spheres of social life where cultural notions of autism are

reproduced and recirculated. Dawn Eddings Prince, an anthropologist diagnosed with

Asperger’s disorder as an adult, succinctly describes the impact that these images have on the

popular understanding of autism:

When most people think of autism they think of violent, unreachable people in worldscompletely of their own making, worlds without keys, feeling no empathy, lackingimagination, and unavailable to the deepest of human needs for contact and love. Havingautism is the worst fate parents can imagine befalling their children and they dread its im-pact on their families. [Prince this issue]

This conceptual framing of autism has profoundly negative consequences for persons with

autism and their families, and for the design of educational programs and therapeutic

interventions. However, recent ethnographic studies (e.g., Bakan et al. 2008; Bagatell 2007;

Kremer-Sadlik 2004; Ochs 2002; Ochs and Solomon 2004, 2005; Ochs et al. 2001, 2004,

2005; Sirota 2004; Solomon 2004, 2008; Sterponi 2004) have challenged this view of autism,

offering accounts of how persons with autism meaningfully engage in a range of ordinary

everyday activities with other people. This special issue is intended not so much as a theory-

driven dialogue among two opposing views, but as a multilogue of theories and voices, of

scholarly research and personal experience, that intertwine perspectives intended to advance

understanding of autism.

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The interdisciplinary social science perspective is especially germane to autism research in

light of the history of autism as a clinical diagnosis. Since its original description (Kanner

1943), theories of autism have undergone multiple and fundamental transformations. The

syndrome itself has shifted from being considered a rare psychogenic condition to being

classified as a neurobiological disorder with prevalence as high as one in 110 children

(Centers for Disease Control 2009). Autism is currently viewed in biomedical terms as a

neurodevelopmental disorder that affects social cognition. Much attention has been given to

cognitive accounts of autism as a disorder of ‘‘theory of mind,’’ meaning the ability to infer

another person’s emotions, beliefs, thoughts, and intentions (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al. 1985).

Other cognitive theories of autism that continue to receive attention include the executive

function theory (e.g., Russell 1997), and weak central coherence theory (e.g., Frith 1989;

Frith and Hill 2004; Happe 1994). The latter suggests that autism disrupts a natural human

propensity to construct ‘‘central coherence,’’ that is, to seek higher-level meaning in a wide

range of stimuli. Other affected areas identified in experimental cognitive psychological

studies are impaired joint attention, imitation, and imaginative play (e.g., Charman and

Baron-Cohen 1994).

Because biomedical accounts have primarily focused on the challenges of affected individ-

uals evinced in laboratory tasks, there is tension between biomedical perspectives on autism

and the everyday experiences of individuals with autism and their families. Specifically, this

tension emerges as the experiences, discourses, and ideologies of persons with autism and

their families contrast with the experiences, discourses, and ideologies of doctors, therapists,

teachers, and others who provide a range of services in institutional settings. The tension

commonly arises at the interface of the personal and the institutional, between theories of

competence and theories of disability, and among orientations toward measurable clinical

change when contrasted with notions of a ‘‘good,’’ meaningful life.

In the first article in the collection ‘‘Regarding the Rise in Autism: Vaccine Safety Doubt,

Conditions of Inquiry, and the Shape of Freedom,’’ Sharon Kaufman considers the ways

medical practitioners and parents co-construct, negotiate and contest precarious notions of

vaccine safety and autism risk. Seeking to understand and describe the cultural work that is

being done by the parents and clinicians, Kaufman examines the vagaries of the

vaccine–autism connection and explores parental awareness of vaccines’ safety and anxieties

about vaccines’ danger.

In the two articles that follow, by Nancy Bagatell and by Dawn Eddings Prince, the authors

illuminate how individuals with autism negotiate and construct, in their everyday activities

and discourses, what it means to be affected by autism in the social world and to live a

meaningful life. In her article, ‘‘From Cure to Culture: Transforming Notions of Autism,’’

Bagatell explores the idea of autism as a way of being. From the perspective of occupational

science, an interdisciplinary academic discipline that examines everyday human activity and

its impact on health and well-being, Bagatell considers an autistic community, a group of

autistic adults who, through their discourse, lexicon, and activities are challenging tradi-

tional, biomedical interpretations of autism. Examining historical trends, she shows how the


widening of the autism spectrum, the advent of the self-advocacy movement, and the ex-

plosion of technology, have enabled individuals to claim a voice that could potentially

transform societal conceptions of autism.

In ‘‘An Exceptional Path: An Ethnographic Narrative Reflecting on Autistic Parenthood

from Evolutionary, Cultural, and Spiritual Perspectives,’’ Prince offers an emic view of

autism. She vividly describes her sense of connection to the natural world and her profound

sense of disconnection from the human world. From being taught about social connected-

ness by gorillas at the zoo to becoming a parent and raising a child, Prince illustrates how

autism can be viewed as a unique way of being in the world and not merely as a medical

condition. Prince’s contribution offers a highly personal, reflexive insider or ‘‘native’’ point

of view, a view informed by her training as an anthropologist. This stance allows for a possi-

bility of something rarely accomplished in autism research: an interaction of various inter-

subjectivities foundational to the ethnographic enterprise (Jacobs-Huey 2002).

In the next four contributions the authors offer detailed analyses of social interaction to

show how children with autism participate in everyday activities and practices. Ochs and

Solomon propose a notion of ‘‘autistic sociality,’’ an observable social phenomenon that has

important implications for an anthropological understanding of human sociality. The

authors outline a ‘‘domain model’’ of sociality that identifies particular situational condi-

tions under which orderly social coordination increases. On the basis of this model, they

proffer an ‘‘algorithm for autistic sociality’’ that promotes social engagement of children

with autism in particular interactional contexts.

Sirota, in her article, ‘‘Narratives of Distinction,’’ takes readers into the everyday lives

of children with autism as they interact with parents at home. Sirota provides compelling

examples from video and audio data of the social competence of children with autism and

suggests that through an apprenticeship of sorts, children with autism use narratives of their

experience as ‘‘technologies of self’’ (Foucault 1988).

In the article ‘‘How to Go On: Intersubjectivity and Progressivity in the Communication of

a Child with Autism,’’ Sterponi and Fasulo draw on conversational analysis and develop-

mental pragmatics perspectives to examine the conversations of a five-year-old boy with

autism, his parents, and a therapist. The authors consider the complex relation between

intersubjectivity (as both a condition for communication and a product of communication),

and progressivity (as sequentially based structural resources that afford continuity in

conversation) faced by a child with autism and his interlocutors. This analysis of verbal so-

cial behavior captures complexities, contradictions, and pitfalls as human beings with and

without autism pursue conversational continuity and understanding.

In the last article of the issue, ‘‘What a Dog Can Do: Children with Autism and Therapy

Dogs in Social interaction,’’ Solomon identifies the dynamics of child–dog–other interac-

tions that support relatively successful participation of children with autism in everyday

activities. Analyzing video- and audio-recorded interactions, parental interviews, and stories

4 ETHOS

written by the children about their experiences with the dogs, Solomon describes how the

inclusion of specially trained dogs mediates the social engagement and interaction of chil-

dren with autism and their family members and peers.

Taken together, the collected articles encourage readers to rethink autism by embracing its

complexity, from the personal experience of those diagnosed with autism and their families

to issues of healthcare and educational policy. Although the contributions are situated in

several branches of anthropology (cultural, existential, linguistic, medical, and psychologi-

cal), in occupational science, and in education, they share a vision of autism as socially

constructed across institutional, ideological, sociohistorical and social-interactional contexts.

Thus, these contributions demarcate a new interdisciplinary domain of inquiry that examines

autism as a contestable and contested sociocultural as well as biomedical construct. The unifying

interest of the contributors to this special issue is in considering how autism figures in the lived

experiences of individuals who have been diagnosed with the condition, in the life worlds of

families, and in the production and contestation of knowledge within and across communities

and institutions. The special issue’s interdisciplinary perspective seeks to capture both the locally

situated contexts of individual and family experiences and the broader sociohistorical and insti-

tutional discourses that offer often conflicting theories of etiology, intervention, and possible

futures.

We are grateful to Mary Lawlor and Richard Grinker (both this issue) for agreeing to

comment on the articles included here. As they note the collection is intended to impact

awareness of autism with a view toward better treatment across lifespan. Although the col-

lection problematizes notions of sociality, intersubjectivity, and the construction of self, the

articles advance (inter)disciplinary approaches that will improve the analysis of these often

taken for granted constructs more generally. These insights gained from research endeavors

elucidating autism promise new theoretical purchase on selves and socialities. We also hope

the issue will further advance research on autism by involving multiple perspectives and

theoretical orientations, and that this interdisciplinarity will more firmly bridge social science

and biomedical knowledge.

OLGA SOLOMON is Research Assistant Professor, Division of Occupational Science andOccupational Therapy, University of Southern California.

NANCY BAGATELL is Assistant Professor, Department of Occupational Therapy, Quinni-piac University.

Notes

Acknowledgments. We would like to thank Gelya Frank, Ph.D., for introducing the idea of this special issue and

for her guidance along the way.

1. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush signed a proclamation designating the last decade of the 20th century as

the ‘‘Decade of the Brain.’’ This proclamation put forth ‘‘to enhance public awareness of the benefits to be derived


from brain research’’ through ‘‘appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities’’ marked an acceleration of

neuroscience research (Bush 1990). Although autism was not mentioned specifically in the proclamation as one of

the disorders of the brain warranting further study, it was during this decade that funding for autism research began

to increase.

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Autismo 1

Education

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