Week 11--Culture as Disability

As I began to write in the forum, I scrolled up to see what other people had written and after writing a few short sentences I realized that I had basically written the exact same thing as carterian about Nunez, the eyes and the US.   thought that Nunez''s story was fascinating and intruiging and the most interesting part to me was about the eyes.  Nunez made fun of the culture for being blind, but the blind culture he had intruded wanted to take out his eyes because they saw it as wrong for his face, that eyes shouldn't be there.  This reminded me of the US and especially now with Bush and the war in Iraq and past events and how we like to go to other countries and tell them what is right and what is wrong. On a side note I found this quote about culture interesting "Culture is not so much a product of sharing as a product of people hammering each other into shape with the well structured tools already available.  We need to think of culture as this very process of hammering a world."

This reading was interesting, however I feel like it reaffirms a major societal gap that needs to be acted upon rather than analyzed further. Individuality has always been sacrificed for the good of the community at large, if one person stands out it disables smooth progress within the group. If someone today has a physical or mental disability, strong opposing opinions or something as small as a different hair style then the greater community finds a way to either change them or to separate them from the community so they are not obstacles of progress. The question we face is whether the disability lies with the individual or with the group. Are we doing a disservice to the child who has special needs by educating him to keep up with the standards of his classmates? Or are we in fact doing society a disservice by quelling original and abstract ideas, hiding those with "disabilities" from plain view and lowering defiant voices to join the group's muffled tones? I believe that culture disables itself, and although we may survive if we move as a group we are not in fact living.  

This reading is very much food for thought that I am sure will be will be well utilized in class. The idea that culture is inherently disabling in some regard makes sense to me. To me, the establishment and maintenance of a culture through exclusivity is a very distinctly human thing to do and most certainly not a bad thing. Where disability is bred is when humans come to the conclusion that, as McDermott and Verenee put it, “We have a culture, and you have a different one.” This boundary holds the potential to either breed contempt or appreciation for other cultures, it depends upon the context of the situation. And I look forward to hearing examples from the class later today.

I found this reading to be really interesting, but... I'm not sure how much I agree with it. Well, I do and I dont, but I feel like some of the things they are pointing out are fairly obvious -- different cultures clash. The majority culture sets the majority norms, making it seem as if the minority norms are not as...normal. I really liked the blind man's world story though, I thought it highlighted their ideas very well.

I'm not sure, though, what the authors are purposing we do about this culture as disability. They make it out to be such a bad thing, but offer no alternative -- to have absolutely no culture? Culture is inevitable, unavoidable. We create culture and in doing so we create disablities, but if culture is unavoidable, aren't disablities as well? I don't know. This reading pointed out a lot of really interesting ideas, but I'm wondering what is the (intended?) impact of this knowledge on the world?

I’ve never thought of culture as a set of tasks before. I suppose that is what is appealing to me about this definition is that culture becomes an active process instead of a stagnant one. As much as the idea of disabling people disturbs me, I’m not sure what can be done about it. We could shift to culture to encompass more people…but it would only lead to casting out new ones. I’m not sure that I’ve mused enough on this topic to have a simple solution.

Either way, it has made me look at my education differently. In some ways, it seems I dream of getting good enough grades, to go to a good enough college most of my life. I remember deciding in fifth grade, a major and a minor. (both have since been discarded). Yet, did I really understand then what college was, what good grades meant? If disabling/enabling culture could be partially credited for my experience, how young must academic culture stretch?

As to my culture, I wrote about New English Bingo. I’m have trouble finding the disabling feature. There are cards designed for the blind, there’s a board of the numbers in the front, so being deaf isn’t a big deal. The only one I could think of was if you were just exceedingly unlucky. Everyone in the Bingo community would have a small ritual or tradition you could perform to fix you, but when it comes down to it, it’s just luck anyway.

We started class with a story from Anne; she had been having dinner with her son and his girlfriend, Katie, when Katie offered to take them to see her cadaver. Of course Anne accepted because its clear she loves a good adventureJ Once they got their, Katie began to describe all of the parts of the body that she knew, but Anne did not see the body in the same way Katie did. While Katie was proud of all of the medical knowledge she had, all Anne could think about was the interior of the person—their soul, perhaps. Anne could only see the human side while Katie could easily look past it to the medical side. It was interesting to see the array of reactions: some looks of disgust; some wide-eyed-eager-to-learn-show-me-to-the-body looks; and some looks of those still deciding.

         Then we started talking about a poem that Anne had posted. We discussed how we felt that the poem’s meaning was that the nature of reality is chaotic and storytelling tries to find a pathway within the chaos. Many people felt strongly about it, saying that the lines about how “stories are lies” and “stories are impossible” just didn’t make any sense. Calling a story a lie is perhaps going to far. And to say that stories are impossible…”If they’re impossible, then how can we create them?” asks Al. Anne continued, “ I interpreted it differently, I think. I took it to mean they are impossible to figure out because they can be so chaotic.”

         We read two papers—one from Audra and the other from Meredith on their own particular cultures. Audra’s was written in the second person making the reader an active part of the story, yet at the end of her paper, many people responded by saying they felt very excluded from her paper—and her school. It was written in an almost fairytale way with everything being perfect and happy, but at the end, the entire class went right to the underside of this culture, or the dark side. Very interesting. With Meredith’s paper, we discussed a lot about the LGBT community (which isn’t even a community within itself at all, apparently). Anne finished class by asking, “What makes a culture?” Only a couple people had the guts to take a stab at it: Krista said, “Within a culture, there is an unspoken or tacitly known agreement.” We then discussed that this may be true, but in order for that to work, everyone in that community must be aware of this “tacit” knowledge.

There were many things about this reading that I found interesting however, it wasn't really groundbreaking in its analysis.

I mean, humans have been utilitarians since the very begining. There is no doubt that the will of the individual is sacrificed for the will of the group.

Now whether this is good or bad- I couldn't say.

What is interesting is how this reading highlighted a psychological...quandry.

A great deal of my very interesting intro psych class deals with diagnosis of illness- what is abnormal or wrong. Being a true child of the 'political correctness' era I squirm at these classifications. So after class one day I approached my professor and asked her whether these definitions were really necessary. She told me that in her personal experience people compared their life with those around them and wanted 'normalcy' which she, in turn, helped them to find. In the end- despite their differences- people willingly succumb to conformity.

Ultimately- the desire to be an individual- is quashed by the will of the group. It is all well and good to complain about society being 'disabling' and that 'the teacher just doesn't understand my childs need to express his emotions' but all the happy-clappy understanding bs has no relevence to the survival of the group.

So if this 'groupthink' mentality ensures the survival of the species- who is really more disabling? Society or the individual?

I had mixed reactions to this reading. I can see how culture can be construed as disabling, but the article fails to address the opposing effect-- culture as enabling. For every scholastic failure, there is a success. As one of the successes, I am miffed that the anthropologists denounced my skills as nothing more than a construct to help others fail for someone's dastardly political gain.

I also didn't understand the whole political reasoning behind the culture as disability theory: how does it help politicians/ society to create these arbitrary, solely disabling measures of worth? This question was not answered in the reading.

One example in particular made me a little wary. Page 8 says "without a kinship system, no orphans". My first reaction to this was "What? Are they saying it's better to not have families because some people end up orphans?" I love my family, and while I sympathize deeply with people who don't have families, I cannot wish that nobody had a family to make orphans happy.

While the American education system creates failures, it also facilitates sharing knowledge in a predictable fashion. While familial systems cut out those children who don't have families, those who do can grow the deepest emotional connections of their lives. While my high school can exclude everyone outside of its 100-person bubble, those in the bubble feel safe and warm and fuzzy inside. I'm sure Bryn Mawr can be exclusionary-- people with Y chromosomes are discouraged from attending right off the bat, and anybody not okay with weird traditions probably wouldn't be well suited for it-- I'm so happy here it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.