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Disabled in Communities

Disability is a universal—in all societies, through all ages, individuals have been born with or have acquired disabilities. The lives of these individuals, however, will in large measure be determined not by the fact that they have a disability but by how the society in which they live conceptualizes what it means to be “disabled.” While specific physiological, psychological, intellectual, and sensory impairments can be discussed without reference to “culture,” understanding what it means to live with a disability requires a solid understanding of the cultural context in which a person with a disability exists.

Cultural Aspects of Disability

It is important to underscore the fact that disability has a strong cultural component, because this has so often been overlooked. Whole libraries are devoted to the medical, rehabilitation, and psychological implications of disability on the individual. Discussion in these disciplines is sometimes expanded to include the psychology, education, or employment of the individual who has the disabling condition. But people who are disabled do not live in a vacuum. All individuals with disability live within a specific culture, and they share, with other members of their culture, learned behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, values and ideals that characterize their society. All individuals with disability are also members of a social network: In addition to being individuals with a disability, they are sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, cousins, neighbors, and fellow citizens. For all these reasons, the extensive literature that discusses individuals with disability solely as patients in a medical or rehabilitation facility or clients who receive services misses much of the complexity of what it means to really live with a disabling condition (Kaplan 1999).

A relatively new field, cross-cultural analysis of disability, requires looking at disability as a “constant,” and the cultural context in which it is found as the variable. Prior to the 1980s, some scholars assumed that there is no cultural variable—that all societies at all times have reacted in much the same way to persons with disability. Moreover, there was an assumption that if persons with disability fare badly in modern society, then their lives must be especially difficult in more traditional societies or in countries where modern medicine and rehabilitation are not widely available. While there is an enormous variation in how individuals with disability are incorporated into the social life of a community, many traditional and/or non-Western models of adaptation to disability have much to teach us about universal approaches to disability.

Background

Discussion of disability in society, seen in the extensive professional literature, is too often mired in sweeping stereotypes that provide relatively little information about disability at the individual or the community level. In fact, disability, as a unified concept, is not universal. Indeed, many languages lack a single word for disability. Rather, societies around the world have tended to group together individuals with specific types of impairments (e.g., the blind, the deaf) and often have very different ways of responding to individuals, depending on what kind of social interpretation underlies their specific disability. Although, traditionally, there may be broad categories (i.e., the unfortunate, the infirm, the crippled), the idea of disability as a single category in which individuals with all types of physical, emotional, sensory and intellectual impairments are routinely placed has come into more prominent usage as a by-product of broad social insurance and social security schemes that have grouped previously distinct categories of individuals together to provide benefit packages within nationstates (Groce 1999).

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