Abstract
Persons with disabilities experience barriers to health within a culture. The local culture assigns meanings to those with impairments and their activities. In order to understand the experience of disability as influenced by culture, anthropological models of rites of passage and liminality have been used, but these can be extended further. The authors posit that local cultures should be the context for studying disability, and thus extend on previous work by Murphy 1 on the rites of passage for persons with disabilities. This article will: (1) review how disability has been culturally created and defined, (2) provide additional evidence for the argument regarding the existence of disability culture, and (3) extend the work on rites of passage for persons with disabilities. A brief discussion of how this expanded model might guide the understanding of disability and the understanding of barriers to health follows.
DISABILITY IS DEFINED BY a person's perception of his or her (in)ability to function with impairment. It occurs when the individual's abilities do not correspond with the demands of their environment, which leads to culturally created barriers to social function. 2 Culture is the main context that shapes the experience of disability because culture gives meaning to the appearance and function of the body. 1 According to Geertz, 3 culture is a web of historically created meanings used to develop and communicate knowledge. This is distinct from material culture, which consists of the products created by a group of people. 4 To add further distinction, local culture consists of face-to-face communication of meaning, and mass culture consists of messages distributed via bulk communication. 4 For instance, local culture is the sharing of meaning through personal interactions, and mass culture shares targeted meanings through techniques such as mass marketing on television. The purpose of this article is to provide a model that explains disability-related meanings within local cultures. This article consists of four sections: (1) a review of how disability has been culturally created and defined, (2) additional evidence for the argument of the existence of disability culture, (3) an extension of Murphy's 1 work on rites of passage for persons with disabilities, and (4) a discussion of the implications of how this model might guide the understanding of disability and the understanding of barriers to health.