A sociocultural model of impairment-disability
Devva Kasnitz, Ed Robert's Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of California, Berkeley
Abstract
Following Shuttleworth's critique of existing theory in anthropology and disability studies, and Hughes and Patterson's work on a "sociology of impairment," in this presentation I describe a new sociocultural model of impairment-disability. Moving beyond the too-simplistic, dichotomous British social model of disability, which posits that biology is to impairment as society is to disability, this new model conceptualizes impairment and disability in all their permutations across cultures. Beginning with a mix of semiotics, existential phenomenology, and human ecology, I define a realm of the biological as viewed through the lens of ethnomedicine and ethnophysiology. Borrowing from Douglas, some human biologies are anomalous to ethno-embodied constructs. Sociocultural systems may apply values and induce interpretations of anomalies as impairments, dependent on context. Likewise dependent on context, sociocultural systems may induce treatment of impairments as disability. This impairment-disability process is based on an initial recognition of anomaly, a judgment of impairment, and varying experience of disability exclusion. It is a fluid process, which operates in real time and space, and can have variable outcomes in different cultural domains. For example, what may exclude someone from marrying may not exclude their participation in ritual or in economic life. Disability becomes an important categorizing and identification process when a preponderance of evidence and/or experience of exclusion/discrimination reach a contextualized threshold. Disability becomes an important political process when access to cultural domains is a matter of debated accommodation or questionable "compensation."