Abstract
Disability studies has been put forth by some archaeologists and bioarchaeologists as potentially useful for their disciplines. In this chapter, we examine a number of models of disability in terms of their congruency with the aims of bioarchaeology and how they might be heuristically useful for this discipline. Given the currency of the differentiation between disability studies and critical disability studies , we further appraise several concepts employed by the latter and indicate points of convergence and tension with bioarchaeology. Suffice to say, in this chapter we do not offer definitive analysis of the issues we raise but seek to open a discussion between bioarchaeology and critical disability studies.
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Notes
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In fact, Tilley takes her argument further by implying that the political sensitivity of the disability rights movement and disability scholarship has been a primary factor that has adversely impacted the development of a bioarchaeology of disability. In other words, bioarchaeologists have been afraid to counter critical perspectives on disability.
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There are complex reasons why we have begun employing the term CDS instead of disability studies, which we cannot sufficiently address here (see Meekosha and Shuttleworth 2009). Suffice to say that disability studies as a term to describe a critical approach to disability is losing its cogency, with many scholars who minimally employ critique now using the term to self-describe themselves. In contrast to a strictly ‘post-conventional’ CDS (e.g., Shildrick 2012), our vision explicitly incorporates both the critical materialist understanding that was the hallmark of a socio-politically defined disability studies and also opens up to the range of critical enquiry associated with post perspectives.
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Disability scholars vary in their strictness in distinguishing between impairment and disability. For example, Garland-Thomson (2015) and Scotch and Schriner (1997, 2001) in their discussions of human variation and biodiversity incorporate impairment into their use of disability. The authors of the present chapter maintain the distinction between impairment and disability when possible for analytic and political purposes, while recognizing the constuctedness of these terms. As in Kaznitz and Shuttleworth’s schema, we view impairment as the negative cultural perception of an individual’s embodiment, which in Western societies has been influenced by biomedicine and is primarily considered in terms of its impact on individual functioning, but which in many non-Western cultures can include meanings that transcend the individual or bodily and behavioral function. We have also previously argued that the social model and its separation of disability from impairment is only “one of a number of separate tools in our analysis … [which aims for] a more complex understanding of disability oppression in our work” (Meekosha and Shuttleworth 2009: 51). Being CDS scholars we understand that these concepts cannot encompass the complex relationships between biology, society, culture, and psyche that exist in disabled people’s actual lives. We further acknowledge that the meanings of these terms may in the future shift according to cultural, political, or scientific reformulations.
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The conceptual move to biodiversity espoused by Garland-Thomson is not without its critics in CDS. Lennard Davis (2013), for example, maintains that, the neoliberal notion of diversity must exclude those persons who cannot choose their identity, which is epitomized by those with impairments without cure. As he argues, “disability (along with poverty) represents that which must be suppressed for [neoliberal] diversity to survive as a concept … (which ultimately seeks sameness)” (2013: 13). Drawing from Davis among others, Friedner and Weingarten (2016) also critique this discourse for not acknowledging the biopolitical underpinnings of the move toward biodiversity and the management of bodies in the twenty-first century. This process is driven by marketplace capitalism and obsession with individual choice and ignores the “economic, social, and political factors that exist in relation to different forms of disability” (4), which flattens out these different forms in equal contribution to human diversity and thus paradoxically works to “erase difference” (4). While these are important considerations, we do not have the space to address them here within the context of an engagement with bioarchaeology.
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Acknowledgments
The authors appreciate the encouragement, support, and feedback for this chapter provided by the editors, Jennifer Byrnes, and Jennifer Muller. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.
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Shuttleworth, R., Meekosha, H. (2017). Accommodating Critical Disability Studies in Bioarchaeology. In: Byrnes, J., Muller, J. (eds) Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56949-9_2
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