This article is an overview of the problems with the legalization of assisted suicide as public policy. The disability community's opposition to assisted suicide stems in part from factors that directly impact the disability community as well as all of society. These factors include the secrecy in which assisted suicide operates today, in states where it is legal; the lack of robust oversight and the absence of investigation of abuse; the reality of who uses it; the dangerous potential of legalization to further erode the quality of the U.S. health care system; and its potential for other significant harms. Legalizing assisted suicide would augment real dangers that negate genuine choice and self-determination. In view of this reality, we explore many of the disability-related effects of assisted suicide, while also addressing the larger social context that inseparably impacts people with disabilities and the broader public. First, after addressing common misunderstandings, we examine fear and bias toward disability, and the deadly interaction of assisted suicide and our profit-driven health care system. Second, we review the practice of assisted suicide in Oregon, the first U.S. state to legalize it, and debunk the merits of the so-called Oregon model. Third and finally, we explore the ways that so-called ''narrow'' assisted suicide proposals threaten inevitable expansion.

This article considers how Christianity contributes to the appearance of cognitive disability in Uganda, a country with some of the most progressive disability policies in the world but little in the way of formal care and advocacy for cognitively disabled people. As a point of departure, the article invokes Hannah Arendt’s notion of appearance as a way to thematize the importance of public display in Ugandan social life, as well as the challenge that people with evidently profound disabilities pose to Ugandan social aesthetics. It first traces how cognitive disability disappears under the liberal logics that organize Uganda’s secular disability laws and activism, and then compares the ways that Catholic and Pentecostal efforts sustain the appearance of cognitive disability, in light of their theological differences and their common paternalism. Even as Christian paternalism in the face of cognitive disability may prove repugnant to a liberal vision of disability politics, I argue that it sustains a form of disability appearance otherwise not possible in Uganda. Bufunze Ekiwandiiko kino kilagira ddala bulungi, nga obukristaayo bwe bwewaddeyo ennyo ku nsonga etekwatiddwa bulungi ey’endabika y’abantu abalina obulemu mu butesobola nga buva ku bwongo nga bali mu Uganda. Eggwanga erya Uganda lirina enkola ennungi mu byokwezza obuggya ku nsonga y’abantu abo munsi yonna. Wabula ate kinakuwaza nnyo, nti libulamu nnyo enkola ennungamu mu ngeri y’okuwagira endabirira esaanidde abantu abo, mu mbeera zaabwe zonna okutwalira awamu. Ekiwandiiko kino okwawukana ku bya bulijjo ebirala byonna, kikoona butereevu ku ndowooza ya Hannah Arendt, era nga kirina n’okulaga okusomooza okuleteddwaawo obutafa bulungi ku bantu abo mu mbeera zaabwe mu ggwanga lyonna. Ekiwandiiko kisookera ddala n’okulaga engeri y’okufaayo ku nsonga eyo bwe kigenda kisaanirawo ddala nga kino kiyita mu kwekkiriranya abantu kwe batambuliramu ng’abakweyambisa, nga bakola amateeka agakwata ku butesobola obw’obwongo, wamu nebirala ebikolebwa okukisaamu amaanyi, Kati ekyo, nga bwe twongerako netukigeerageeranya n’ekyo ekikolebwa abakatuliki n’aba Pentekooti ku nsonga eyo yemu mu kuyimirizaawo endabika entuufu eyandisaanidde ku bantu abo abalina obulemu bwobutesobola. Naye ate olwokuberawo enjawukana z’e byeddini wakati waabo bombi, nekitasobola kutambula bulungi, nga kino kiva mu kugaaana okukolera awamu nga abantu abali ku mulimu ogumu. Ekisinga obukulu nga kyekireeeta obutakkanya obwo kyangu okulaba. Kale obutasobola kukolera wamu olw’obukulu bwensonga eyo, nakyo kiyinza okuva ku bukyaayi okwesigamiziddwa ku kwolesebwa okulina obulemu mu bwongo, mu nfuga yaabwo egobererwa. Ekyo ne kiyimirizaawo endabika eyobulemu obutesobola era nga nayo tesoboka mu Uganda kukolebwako.

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How can we study significant cognitive differences within social groups anthropologically? Attempting to do so challenges some of the discipline's most cherished methodological, analytical and ethical commitments, raising questions about how we understand difference, both between and within societies. Such challenges both explain the neglect of the topic up until now and suggest its scholarly potential. In this article, we move to lay the groundwork for an anthropology that takes seriously cognitive differences (such as autism, dementia and intellectual disability), as well as their potentially disabling consequences. We ask: what kind of cross-cultural reality does cognitive variation have, and how problematic are such differences for those who live with them? We spell out at greater length some of the difficulties involved in developing this conversation, attempt to address these issues, and delineate some of the important benefits that follow from doing so.The articles in this issue move to lay the groundwork for an anthropology of cognitive disability. They respond to recent calls to examine disability as an axis of human difference that is as fundamental as anthropology's usual suspects, such as society and culture, race and class, gender and sexuality (Ginsburg and Rapp 2013;Kasnitz and Shuttleworth 2001). These calls ask what might be gained by attention to the lives of people with bodies that depart, at times quite radically, from what is normative in a particular social world. We join this conversation by concentrating not on bodies that diverge from social expectations, but minds -a focus that has, to date, received relatively little systematic attention in disability studies, the anthropology of disability, and anthropology more broadly.The Social Model of Disability has powerfully shown that biological impairments of bodily capacities do not necessarily lead to disabilities -that is, limitations in