Disability and Culture

The cultural understanding of the concept 'disability' is central to the determination of the position or status that the disabled individuals are given in a specific society. Cultural understanding is also shaped by the meanings attached to the concepts of human being or personhood, by the social and economic organization of a given society, or by other internal and external cultural dynamics.

Ingstad and Whyte (p. 8) note that the conceptions of disability are formed by the conceptions of the person in a culture. The 'person' refers to the evaluation of others as opposed to self-evaluation. Large and small scale societies perceive the concept of disability differently. According to Scheer and Groce (1988, pp. 331-32), in small-scale societies close interactions between individual members are the norm, and each individual may have extended and multi-strand relationships with other members of the society. Individuals may interact in the course of economic production, during leisure time, or while participating in the arts or ceremonies. The social identity of the person in these small-scale societies is based on family clan and other characteristics and not on how the individual looks. Natural integration of the disabled into family life and community activities is the norm in many small-scale societies. The disabled, as we will see in the course of this paper, are viewed as unique individuals and not as persons with disabilities.

In large-scale societies, on the other hand, where social relations and contexts are more impersonal, individuals are not directly related to each other in varied contexts. For example, relationships that begin at work often end at work. Based on the concepts of equality and individual rights, there is a general assumption that people are not different: difference is treated as invisible. Large-scale societies' conceptions of disability are, therefore, formed not from within the general society and the social processes, but "in the context of the centralist state that imposes a universal code through legislation" (Ingstad & Whyte, p. 8). Legislation determines the existence and recognition of the disabled by defining what it means to be disabled, establishing criteria, and determining the classification of the disabled. Legislation also determines the establishment of medical and paramedical institutions as well as educational services. In this way, people with infirmities become a marked group; they are given social identity; as citizens who have the same rights as others and should be integrated like ordinary people. Disability, therefore, in Europe and North America exists within and is created by a framework of state, legal, economic, and biomedical institutions. The concepts of personhood are also inevitably shaped by those institutions. This situation is not helped by the mass media, which according to Ferguson et. al. (1992, p.229), tend to portray the disabled negatively. They note, for example, that stories, be they fairy tales or movies, tend to portray the villain as associated with abnormality, whether physical, psychological, or mental. They also note that there are usually very few positive images of the disabled in the media. The positive images displayed are mainly of disabled children and very rarely adults. This tends to give the impression that the disabled are like children.

What is your view or what happens in your culture?