BEYOND “PSYCHOTICS” AND THE “FEEBLE-MINDED”: Psychological Anthropology and the Disabled Mind

Publication Date

1-1-2024

Document Type

Contribution to a Book

Publication Title

Innovations in Psychological Anthropology

DOI

10.4324/9781003311713-4

First Page

43

Last Page

61

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors draw on the social model of disability to challenge the implicit ableism in neuroanthropology and psychological anthropology and call for a more capacious understanding of personhood that challenges assumptions about language and biology that tacitly frame anthropological accounts of full personhood. They argue that the liberal humanist underpinnings of anthropology, psychiatry, and neurology disavow the entanglement of ableism and capitalism in the organization of scientific knowledge that frames the capacities of individuals with a range of disabilities. To do so, the authors draw on their individual research projects on communication disorders and mental illness in the United States to show how attending to the experiences of atypical communicators reveals complex inner worlds and rescues psychosis from stereotypes of meaninglessness and delusion. This additionally demonstrates how psychosis operates as a situated response to the gender, race, and class contradictions of American capitalism. Finally, the authors return to the question of how a more capacious conception of atypicality—captured in Deleuze and Guattari’s use of “psychotics”—might ground a politics of inclusion and lay the groundwork for a psychological anthropology that is more inclusive of human difference by standing against the reductionism of normalcy as a function of capitalism.

Department

Anthropology

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