Introductioǹ`A utism made social life hard, but it made animals easy.'' Temple Grandin (2005, page 1) Qualitative analysis of recent autistic autobiographies (Davidson, 2007; 2008a; 2008b, and below) reveals that authors' relations with nonhuman others constitute a significant emergent theme. This theme, which is explicitly the focus of best-selling volumes such as Temple Grandin's (2005) Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behaviour and Dawn Prince-Hughes's (2004) Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism, recurs so frequently (appearing in approximately half of the forty-five texts studied) that it clearly merits further investigation. Such autobiographical writings suggest that autistic interactions with animalsöand sometimes also inanimate aspects of the`natural' environmentöhave profoundly emotional qualities of a kind more usually associated with social settings. This suggestion is conspicuously at odds with widespread popular views, largely supported by clinical accounts, that autistic individuals (1) are exceptionally asocial and almost entirely unconcerned with the beings and doings of others (Frith, 1996; Tidmarsh and Volkmar, 2003). The name given to the disorder does, after all, derive from the Greek autos (meaning`self ') and is fully intended to connote the aloneness and separation of those frequently described as living as if`in a world of their own' (Szatmari, 2004; see also Davidson, 2007).
Social and cultural theorists readily deconstruct what they regard (with some justification) as the naturalistic pretensions of environmental ethics. However, despite innovative attempts to incorporate environmentalism's values into theoretical frameworks as varied as those of Habermas and Foucault, contemporary social theory has often failed to reflect on the disciplinary limitations of its own critique. To the extent that it poses a fundamental challenge to both anthropocentrism and a sociological reduction of ethical values environmental ethics not only re-evaluates our relations with nature but may also be in the process of engendering a more reflexive sociology.
In modern society natural objects like spiders or snakes have a primary role as the loci of specific phobias. Drawing on interviews with members of the UK National Phobics Society (NPS) and associated service providers, this paper explores the implications of the increasingly significant role played by new media, particularly Virtual Reality technologies, in the treatment of these 'bio-phobias'. While advanced technological approaches provide new possibilities for individual sufferers to experiment with and control their phobic responses they also exemplify certain aspects of those specifically modern social relations that are the media within which bio-phobic behaviours develop. From a critical sociological perspective the techno-philic move to the medium of cyber-space may actually exaggerate characteristically modern social relations that seek (but never convincingly manage) to assert complete 'cultural' control over the unpredictable 'natural' elements threatening our cultural integrity.
Specific phobias of natural objects, such as moths, spiders and snakes, are both common and socially significant, but they have received relatively little sociological attention. Studies of specific phobias have noted that embodied experiences of disgust are intimately associated with phobic reactions, but generally explain this in terms of objective qualities of the object concerned and/or evolutionary models. We draw on the work of Kolnai, Douglas and Kristeva to provide an alternative phenomenological and culturally informed account of the complex links between pervasive social categories and their emotional embodiment and expression in phobic individuals.
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