Abstract
What are we talking about when we talk about autism? This commentary considers this question and the different ways autism is defined and addressed in Clarice Rios, Enrico Valtellina, and Roy Richard Grinker’s chapters of this volume. It discusses autism as a “concept,” an idea that is conceptualized in a variety of ways and holds a variety of meanings for different people.
M. A. Cascio—The work described in this commentary was carried out at the Department of Anthropology, Case Western Reserve University.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Benedict, Ruth. 1934. Patterns of Culture. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Bleuler, Eugen. 1950. Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias. Oxford, UK: International Universities Press.
Canguilhem, Georges. 1978. On the Normal and the Pathological. Studies in the History of Modern Science, vol. 3. Dordrecht, Holland and Boston: D. Reidel.
Cascio, M. Ariel. 2012. “Neurodiversity: Autism Pride Among Mothers of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.” Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities 50 (3): 273–283.
Cascio, M. Ariel. 2014. “New Directions in the Social Study of the Autism Spectrum: A Review Essay.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 38 (2): 306–311.
Cascio, M. Ariel. 2015. “Biopolitics and Subjectivity: The Case of Autism Spectrum Conditions in Italy.” Ph.D. dissertation, Case Western Reserve University.
Chew, Kristina. 2013. “Autism and the Task of the Translator.” In Worlds of Autism, edited by Joyce Davidson and Michael Orsini, 305–318. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Devereux, George. 1980. Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Estroff, Sue. 1993. “Identity, Disability, and Schizophrenia: The Problem of Chronicity.” In Knowledge, Power, and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life, edited by Shirley Lindenbaum and Margaret M. Lock, 247–286. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Eyal, Gil, Brendan Hart, Emine Onculer, Beta Oren, and Natasha Rossi. 2010. The Autism Matrix: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Eyal, Gil, Des Fitzgerald, Eva Gillis-Buck, Brendan Hart, Martine D. Lappé, Daniel Navon, and Sarah S. Richardson. 2014. “New Modes of Understanding and Acting on Human Difference in Autism Research, Advocacy and Care: Introduction to a Special Issue of BioSocieties.” BioSocieties 9 (3): 233–240.
Gaines, Atwood D. 1991. “Cultural Constructivism: Sickness Histories and the Understanding of Ethnomedicines Beyond Critical Medical Anthropologies.” In Anthropologies of Medicine: A Colloquium on West European and North American Perspectives, edited by Beatrix Pleiderer and Gilles Bibeau, 221–258. Wiesbaden, Germany: Vieweg Und Sohn Verlag.
Hacking, Ian. 2006. “Making Up People.” London Review of Books. August 17: 23–26.
Hacking, Ian. 2010. “Autism Fiction: A Mirror of an Internet Decade?” University of Toronto Quarterly 79 (2): 632–655.
Hart, Brendan. 2014. “Autism Parents & Neurodiversity: Radical Translation, Joint Embodiment and the Prosthetic Environment.” BioSocieties 9 (3): 284–303.
Joralemon, Donald. 2015. Exploring Medical Anthropology. 3rd ed. Milton Park, Abingdon and Oxon: Routledge.
Kirmayer, Laurence J. 1988. “Mind and Body as Metaphors: Hidden Values in Biomedicine.” In Biomedicine Examined, edited by Margaret Lock and Deborah Gordon, 57–93. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.
Kleinman, Arthur, and Byron J. Good, eds. 1985. “Introduction: Culture and Depression.” In Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder, edited by Arthur Kleinman and Byron J. Good, 1–33. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lock, Margaret. 2013. The Alzheimer Conundrum: Entanglements of Dementia and Aging. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
McDougall, Rosalind. 2015. “Reviewing Literature in Bioethics Research: Increasing Rigour in Non-Systematic Reviews.” Bioethics 29 (7): 523–528.
Murray, Stuart. 2008. Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Nadesan, Majia Holmer. 2005. Constructing Autism: Unravelling the “Truth” and Understanding the Social. New York, NY: Routledge.
Rose, Nikolas. 1998. Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Silverman, Chloe. 2012. Understanding Autism: Parents, Doctors, and the History of a Disorder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sinclair, Jim. 1993. “Don’t Mourn for Us.” Electronic Document, http://www.autreat.com/dont_mourn.html.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cascio, M.A. (2018). Commentary: What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Autism?. In: Fein, E., Rios, C. (eds) Autism in Translation. Culture, Mind, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93293-4_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93293-4_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-93292-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-93293-4
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)