Anthropology and Intellectual Disability

Anthropology’s methodological innovations enable us to get closer to the experiences, lives, and self-narrations of individuals categorized as having intellectual disabilities. Moreover, anthropology approaches intellectual disability from a cross-cultural perspective in order to facilitate better understanding of how the condition varies (and what it is affected by) in different societies. In doing so, it contributes significant missing pieces to the psychiatric puzzle of just how and why people become intellectually disabled—enabling us to reflect more deeply on the relationship between biological and social factors. Anthropology’s perspective (particularly on societies where ‘intellectual disability’ is not an important category) also reveals the particularity of the cultural conditions that support the psychiatric categorization of intellectual disability in the first place; as well as its limitation in framing the lives of such individuals in other contexts and in other aspects of their lives. This gives us deeper insight into what it is like to live as someone classified as intellectually disabled, as well as what such classifications leave out about them as rich, rounded, and feeling humans.