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Disability Anthropology
Disability anthropology is the combined subdisciplines of Anthropology that focus their research on disability studies within the concept of culture. Each subdiscipline of anthropology overlaps with disability studies, with its main contributions coming from the medical and cultural fields of anthropology. The collaboration of anthropology and disability studies aims to further the understanding of the lives of disabled individuals cross-culturally; to improve the quality of life for disabled persons; and to promote a mutual engagement and collaboration in research and curriculum development by anthropologists and other scholars looking at disability.

The field of disability anthropology has connection to applied anthropology, in which research focuses on understanding socio/cultural problems within disability and using the research to develop and assess approaches to solving problems or helping to bring about positive change in the disabled community.

The topic of disability within anthropology persuades researchers to use a cultural lens and ethnological approach to identify unfamiliarity and “otherness” among cultures. Disability is a uniquely compelling aspect of anthropology that makes it a natural discipline to engage in through an established anthropological discipline. Ethnographers pursue research in disability anthropology for a renewal of their experience of unfamiliarity in a known field site; researchers may also be looking for “otherness” closer to home; and also attracts anthropologists because it is a socially and culturally constructed category with important implications about how societies differentially distribute power.

History
The contribution of anthropology to disability studies is still relatively new, with a few pioneering works forming the foundation for a growing field of study. Anthropologists have contributed to the understanding of disability in a social and cultural context, through the use of ethnographic, phenomenological, and cross-cultural methods.

One of the first anthropological studies of disability was conducted by Ruth Benedict, a pioneer in the field of anthropology, who published a seminal study of cross-cultural conceptions of epilepsy in 1934. This was the first major anthropological study of disability, and since the 1930s, a cultural framework has been central to the anthropological study of disability. Ruth Benedict was a very established anthropologist in her time and formed a close relationship with her student, Margaret Mead. Mead became the first anthropologist who publicly proposed that people with disabilities need to be included in anthropological inquiry to fully understand human nature. The introduction of the disability rights movement and the independent living model in the 1960s and 1970s brought disability to the forefront of national attention and sparked the interest of medical and cultural anthropologists.

Although many studies were done throughout this time period, anthropological inquiry in disability blossomed during the 1980s, where Joan Ablon emerged as a major scholar in the field and influenced future generations of anthropologists interested in disability.

Some important figures in the discourse of anthropological involvement in disability include Devva Kasnitz and Russell Shuttleworth. Kasnitz has been a strong advocate for anthropology to engage more fully with disability studies and has argued for increased legitimacy for the contributions of anthropologists with disabilities. Shuttleworth’s work has focused on how a critical exploration of multiple roles and allegiances can challenge the assumptions of both anthropology and disability studies in his research on the search for sexual intimacy for men with cerebral palsy in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Disability Research Interest Group
The Disability Research Interest Group (DRIG) is a special interest group of the Society for Medical Anthropology which focuses on creating ties between people who contribute to disability anthropology, such as scholars, educators, activists, and practitioners. Their goal consists of educating colleagues and to foster anthropological conversations about disability and the theoretical insights of disability studies in the classroom, at conferences, in informal communication, and in scholarly research and publications. DRIG promotes the participation of people with disabilities in the field of anthropological research, and seeks a future for the field that recognizes ableism as a form of systemic oppression that intersects with other forms of difference with disability as an intersectional category. DRIG wants to ensure disabled people studied by anthropologists are not only objects of study but active makers and/or participants in their own history, as researchers, educators, and research participants.