AJOB Neuroscience | 2019
A Cross-Cultural Neuroethics View on the Language of Disability
Abstract
The AJOB Neuroscience insight article, “A Cross-Cultural Neuroethics View on the Language of Disability,” gathers social science empirical data detailing the words that structure the human variations we think of as disabilities in a range of locations across the globe (Illes and Lou, 2019). Implicit in the evidence, this study presents and explicates briefly in the introduction to the article is not only that language shapes human experience but that such representations are culturally dependent and socially situated. Despite some gestures toward analysis or conclusions about the cultural work of language, the article is a raft of uninterpreted information. We learn, for example, that in 2012 the BBC issued guidelines on appropriate language about disability, that as of 2014 people in Bhutan use words that translate into English as stupid, dumb, and retarded to describe people with disabilities, and that in 2015 people in northern Ghana children with disabilities are considered to be spirits sent to harm family and community and are ritually killed. The limitation of such a method and genre of presentation is that not only do we get information without an adequate framework for interpretation, but there is no development of the implications the evidence in this comparative study presents except the tautology that different cultures use different language about disability. The work of this commentary is to offer a brief humanities-based interpretive framework to augment the article. Perhaps the central premise of the knowledge system we call the humanities is that representation structures reality. What such a claim means is that the systems of representation that humans have developed across time and place shape the shared human enterprises of community building and culture making. From birth to death, language about our bodies tells us how to think about ourselves and how to live our lives. The language of pink or blue, Jennifer or Jonathan, masculine or feminine, makes us into women or men. The language of black and white, handsome or pretty, healthy or sick, normal or abnormal, shapes how and who we become over our lifetimes. In other words, representational systems such as images, narratives, and language don’t simply reflect human existence, they collectively make our lives and our world. The words we call each other, then, make us who we are, or to put it in more philosophical terms, language hails us into existence. The liberties of self-ownership that 19th-century American progressive politics offered was taken up robustly in the 20th century in the form of widespread human and civil rights movements for justice and inclusion, a part of which was a politics of self-naming from groups that had traditionally been the targets of discrimination and segregation. Racial and ethnic groups, having long chafed under negative linguistic assessments from their oppressors, engaged in a robust politics of self-naming that continues into the present. Early-20thcentury African-American leaders proposed the New Negro, a dignification of racial difference that works against the common slurs of everyday racist language. The black nationalist and civil rights movements of the mid 20th century gave us the call “Black is beautiful” and launched the practice of hyphenated identities such as African-American that hearkened to cultural roots. So too, the early women’s movement experimented with monikers such as Womyn and, with more success, revealed and criticized how words such as ladies, girls, or dolls, previously understood as polite or complimentary, did the work of trivializing women’s place and contributions. At more than 50% of the population, women needed to claim equality and justice somewhat differently from a minority group model. The work of the word women arguably consolidated a majority group that varied greatly across socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic categories. This surge of cultural self-naming that the mid-20thcentury civil rights movement in the United States encouraged has been taken up as well by groups of people living under the stigma of medical diagnoses that frame their ways of being as deficits or misfortunes. The