10 research outputs found
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What Escapes Persuasion: Why Intellectual Disability Troubles 'Dependence' in Liberal Societies.
What expectations about the mind do people with intellectual disabilities depart from? A dominant argument maintains that their mental dependence troubles liberal relations premised upon a myth of autonomy. By analyzing the centrality of persuasion in a home for adults with intellectual disabilities in the UK, I ask instead about the psychological assumptions made by relationships of care. Persuasion aims to cultivate, not their independence from care but rather, a recognition of their dependence upon it. Persuasive care's repeated failure suggests an alternative answer to the question: people with intellectual disabilities are too independent-minded for this form of dependence.This research was funded by a generous scholarship from Trinity College, Cambridge and support from the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge
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Receiving the Gift of Cognitive Disability
How valuable can people with mental disabilities be to others? In this article I present ethnographic material on LâArche, a Christian charity that provides care. I describe how carers there are trained to see cognitive disability as producing not simply an absence of rational agency, but also the presence of a quite different way of actively inhabiting the world. I argue that, by learning to recognize and value this unusual kind of agency, carers in LâArche subvert the terms of a recent philosophical debate about the worth of people with cognitive disabilities. They demonstrate that people can value others not just as rational moral subjects, or simply as passive objects of care, but also as charismatic and intuitive agents who actively depart from standard norms of personhood
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Disabling Violence: Intellectual Disability and the Limits of Ethical Engagement
Carers for people with intellectual disabilities in the UK are obliged to drive bad intimacy out of the caring relationship and enable these individuals to find positive forms of ethical reciprocity. In an organisation called LâArche UK, these two aims are combined when carers pursue friendships with those they support that go beyond the bonds contractual care. What happens to this ethical project when those with intellectual disabilities are violent to their care-givers? Trying to pursue ethical engagement in this context has the unexpected aim of creating distrustful and tense relationships. This raises questions not only about what role intentionality and responsibility play in thwarting this project, but also what âsuccessâ would look like â that is, what ethical engagement actually involves
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The Genre of Judgment
What part should description play in coming to judgment? Questions about genre have become more important in religious ethics as many seek to reform âthinâ models of ethical arbitration by recourse to artistic, literary, and historical descriptions in their texts. In this book discussion, I explore what the consequences would be of pursuing this reform by turning to social anthropologyâa discipline that relies on extensive empirical descriptions. I do this by considering the anthropology of ethics: a movement that seeks, for the first time, to devote systematic and sustained attention the moral lives of ethnographic informants. I focus on the ways that authors within this field attempt to arrive at more realistic portraits of the different ways societies play out the familiar ethical themes of freedom, responsibility, suffering and agency. Their work challenges religious ethicists to consider what ethical conversation across these differences would look like, and thus to reconsider the relationship between description and judgment in their work
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Care
This entry traces the different practices of care around the world and asks what cross-cultural ethnographic research contributes to our understandings of these basic human relationships. First, we explore the structures of care: and how care is organized and distributed by contemporary states and markets, as well as how it is configured and transformed in relation to capitalism, globalization, and migration. Second, we analyse how careâs political, economic, and moral dimensions become ambivalently entangled in everyday relationships. We take ethnography as a starting point to understanding the ethics of care and what is considered âgoodâ or âefficaciousâ care in different cultural contexts and in different settings, such as in medical care institutions or in the relationships between carers and those for whom they care. Finally, we explore caring roles and relationships in kinship and in communities, how they might question taken-for-granted assumptions about what care ought to look like and where it should be located, and how they are changing. There is nothing universal or given about care. This is precisely why anthropology is distinctive in its ability to illuminate diverse, unequal, and ever-changing expressions of care around the world
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Mentally Fit: Negotiating the Boundaries of Cognitive Disability.
Why do some people's minds seem conspicuous, disabled, and ill-fitting in some contexts and not others? This special issue presents articles about people in Jordan, Uganda, the United Kingdom and the United States who live with Down syndrome, autism, intellectual disabilities, cerebral palsy, or histories of brain injuries. We focus on the disjunctive encounters between these individuals' minds and the varied relational processes in their surrounding social world in order to understand why different mental characteristics become points of concern and comparison at some points and not others - and thus to raise questions about how "fitting in" works altogether
Against better judgment: Akrasia in anthropological perspectives
Anthropologists have long explained social behaviour as if people always do what they think is best. But what if most of these explanations only work because they are premised upon ignoring what philosophers call 'akrasia' - that is, the possibility that people might act against their better judgment? The contributors to this volume turn an ethnographic lens upon situations in which people seem to act out of line with what they judge, desire and intend. The result is a robust examination of how people around the world experience weaknesses of will, which speaks to debates in both the anthropology of ethics and moral philosophy