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Fieldwork on Another Planet: Social Science Perspectives on the Autism Spectrum

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Abstract

The autism spectrum disorders are a group of neurodevelopmental syndromes of communication, behavior and social cognition. Over the past decade, they have received increasing attention from scholars in the social sciences. This research has been motivated by the prospect of critiquing and improving support services and therapies, by self-advocates who have argued that autism should be tolerated as a form of difference rather than treated as a disorder, and by the interest inherent in syndromes that seem to affect many of the attributes that we use to define personhood. In this commentary, I review social science research on the autism spectrum. I identify some key approaches in the work, including the idea of autism as a culture, transcultural comparisons, studies based on treatment strategies, investigations of subjectivity and interpersonal relations, and research on social movements. In the process, I suggest some further directions for this area of research. I also consider some reasons why the autism spectrum disorders are a particularly interesting site for studies of the ways that biomedical information is used to craft individual and group identities.

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Notes

  1. 1 Her observation inspired the title of An anthropologist on Mars: Seven paradoxical tales, a 1995 book by the neurologist Oliver Sacks.

  2. 2 However, this is not necessarily the case in every cultural context. In ultraorthodox communities in Israel, for instance, mothers of children with autism share an explanatory framework that makes use of a combination of religious and medical explanations (Shaked and Bilu, 2006).

  3. 3 Portia Iverson describes her association with Soma Mukhopadhyay and her use of the Rapid Prompting Method with her son, Dov, in Strange son (2007). Iverson and her husband Jonathan Shestack founded the Cure Autism Now Foundation (CAN), a parent organization focused on funding autism research, in 1995.

  4. 4 Baron-Cohen (2003) has more recently argued that autism represents a failure in empathizing that could be considered an ‘extreme form of the male brain’ (a theory first proposed by Hans Asperger in his 1944 case series). Many neuroscientists who work on connecting brain structure to function in autism argue that theory of mind is a higher-order function that emerges or fails to emerge only as a result of more fundamental processes that can malfunction in, potentially, a variety of ways. Matthew Belmonte (2008) provides a very helpful discussion of the different ways that psychologists and literary critics (and others writing in the humanities) utilize the concept of ‘theory of mind’, suggesting in the process that what appear to be deficits in theory of mind may in fact represent problems with ‘narrative representation’.

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Acknowledgements

Olga Solomon, Laura Sterponi, Dawn Prince-Hughes, Elizabeth Nickrenz, Melissa Park, Cre Engelke and Dario Mangano, as members of a panel on ‘Autism and Intersubjectivity across Life-Worlds’ at the 2007 American Anthropological Association conference in Washington, DC, gave me the opportunity as their discussant to think through some of the ideas for this review. I'm grateful to all of them for their excellent papers and the productive discussion that followed. Bob Vitalis offered thoughtful comments on multiple drafts, Phoebe Rose pointed out a number of references to work on autism that I had missed, and the members of the Disability Studies Reading Group at Penn State helped me think about issues relating to disability and citizenship in new ways.

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    Chloe Silverman

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Silverman, C. Fieldwork on Another Planet: Social Science Perspectives on the Autism Spectrum. BioSocieties 3, 325–341 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1017/S1745855208006236

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