Introduction

Abstract

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

Becoming malleable

“…Indeed, studying human malleability has been part and parcel of the anthropological project. Recent approaches in the anthropological study of disability show how anthropologists might bridge the gap between being malleable “out there” and being malleable “at home.” Analyzing the challenges that intellectual disability poses for anthropologists, Patrick McKearney and Tyler Zoanni argue that anthropologists implicitly assume the psychic unity of humanity and that people are fundamentally “the same” (McKearney & Zoanni, 2023). They stress that intellectual disability challenges how we define and understand personhood.…”

“…Being malleable “at home” makes us better scholars and community members too. In both cases, if we assume neither the psychic unity of all humankind—returning to McKearney's and Zoanni's (2023) provocation—or the sensory and communicative unity of all humankind, it creates the moral conditions for malleability. This moves us beyond the usual work that anthropologists do in terms of interrogating and being sensitive to the perceptions of those with whom they do research: Did you see the rabbit in the moon?…”