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Disability, Handicap & Society

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The Body Silent

Paul Abberley
Published online: 23 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Paul Abberley (1988) The Body Silent, Disability, Handicap & Society, 3:3, 305-307
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02674648866780311

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Book Reviews

305

it provides no reliability data or validity information on the techniques . It does

tighten up on the application of a common technique but it might have been more
critical. In so doing, the book could inform us on the circumstances of the enormous
claimed improvement in detection in Nottingham from 20% to 70% in the first year,
due to the techniques described .
Overall, there is merit in establishing standard techniques for auditory screening and the book's clear style will no doubt help many health visitors . More is
required in the way of justification of the techniques and more questioning should
be encouraged in relation to the techniques themselves and to the outcomes for deaf
children.

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Correspondence: Dr Jim Kyle, University of Bristol, 22 Berkeley Square, Bristol BS8

1 HP, United Kingdom .

The Body Silent

1987
New York, Henry Holt
xi+242 pp ., $17.95
ROBERT F . MURPHY,

Robert Murphy, an anthropologist for 40 years and a disabled person for the last 16
of them, has here produced an uneasy marriage of autobiography and theory . The
autobiographical sections of the book, chronicling his experience of the progressively
debilitating physical and social effects of an inoperable spinal tumour, document the
author's passage from able-bodied to handicapped identity . The shock and surprise
expressed here, and in other accounts of impairment experienced in adulthood, I, as
someone disabled in childhood, probably find as hard to grasp as an able-bodied
reader, but for diametrically opposite reasons . My first reaction `how could he NOT
know that it would be like this?' changes to the recognition that of course people, or
rather white Anglo-Saxon heterosexual males, in general have nothing in their
experience which corresponds even partially to the social subordination experienced
by disabled people. When Murphy describes the easier interactions he now has, in
his disabled state, with women, he attributes this to the fact that he no longer
constitutes a sexual threat and to "the traditional female role in nurturing and in the
care of the sick" (p . 128) . This is certainly true, but another factor is also present ;
elements of similar, though different, oppressions which he and they now share .
Being infantilised, talked over and not being given your own menu, experiences he
finds so devastating in his new status, are the common experience of women .
Murphy does, however, attribute a perceived change in his relationship with
black people to a certain convergence of experience : "I am now a white man who is
worse off than they are, and my subtle loss of public standing brings me closer to
their own status" . Yet this `status' is understood only in terms of Interactionist
romanticism-"We share a common position on the periphery of society-we are
fellow Outsiders" (p . 127) . The problems I have with the whole book stem from its

306 Book Reviews

groundedness in a particular kind of descriptive anthropology, based in the work of
Levi-Strauss, Leach and the phenomenologists, which sees societies as, in the final
analysis, the embodiment not of social and economic relationships, but of thought
systems.
Thus Murphy asserts:

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There are . . no strong economic reasons for the systematic exclusion and
abasement of the physically handicapped, except for the . minor fact that
they often are supported and cared for at public expense . (pp . 129-130)
Now as Stone has argued (1984) this is, in Murphy's native United States, by no
means a MINOR fact, and in Britain the effects of new benefit rules will result in
no small saving to Government in Welfare payments to, amongst others, disabled
people .
In addition to this, writers such as Townsend (1979) have indicated that those
disabled people in employment are likely to produce higher rates of profit for
capitalism, whilst Leonard (1984) indicates a broader but ultimately economic
function served by disabled people as members of a `welfare sub-class' .
Again, the reluctance of employers to give jobs to suitably qualified disabled
people is explicable in terms of an imperative of capitalism to ensure as cheap and
adaptable a workforce as possible .
But Murphy is not seriously interested in the grubby realities of economic
existence, with its implication that in changed economic circumstances social
consciousness would be altered .
He prefers the eternal verities of a certain kind of structural anthropology,
which based as they are on the generalisation of the historical and transcultural
oppression of disabled people, offer us no change . Thus rejection of disabled people
for Murphy is ultimately inevitable, since we constitute that conceptual monstrosity,
the category mistake (pp . 131-133) .
As a result of this pessimism about the possibility of social orders being
different, it is not surprising to find Murphy citing Goffman & Davis, with their
infinitely convoluted embroideries of the coping mechanisms developed by eternal
underdogs, as the most perceptive authors writing specifically about disability .
In this vein, Murphy finds it hard to avoid presenting the disabled person as if
he WERE the substance of social generalisations, the flawed antihero of myth .
In contrast to this, I would argue that this very myth is part and parcel of the
oppression of disabled people, since it perpetuates the idea of a metaphysical
`otherness', whilst directing attention away from the real physical and social
differences which disadvantage disabled people .
In conclusion, whilst I can have no quarrel with the autobiographical aspects of
the book, the theorising about disability is firmly grounded in the ahistorical
perspectives of Interactionist sociology, and thus shares its major deficiencies .

Book Reviews

307

REFERENCES

LEONARD, P . (1984) Personality and Ideology: towards a materialist understanding of the individual

(Basingstoke, Macmillan) .
STONE, D . (1984) The Disabled State (Basingstoke, Macmillan) .
TOWNSEND, P . (1979) Poverty in the United Kingdom (London, Penguin) .

Correspondence: Paul Abberley, Department of Economics and Social Science,

Bristol Polytechnic, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS 16, United Kingdom .

Community Care for Mentally Handicapped Children

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PAMELA ABBOT & ROGER SAPSFORD, 1987

Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, Open University Press

84 pp., 4 .50 (paperback)
Community Care for Mentally Handicapped Children brings together two papers
which chart the historical development of policy in Britain and the USA, and
examine its implications for caring mothers today . While acknowledging that "real
impairment of social and intellectual ability" does exist, the authors argue from the
perspective of labelling theory that mental handicap is a social `construction' whose
"nature varies from time to time and from place to place" . Their thesis is that the
breakdown of the feudal system, when allied to changing values heralded by the
Reformation and the Enlightenment, created fertile soil for `the great confinement'
of all marginal social groups who were not economically productive and hence
judged a threat to law and order . With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, these
`older forms of social control' could cope with neither economic change nor the
associated political unrest . At first, people with mental handicaps were caught up in
new processes of classification and segregation which aimed to protect the respectable working class from the influence of disruptive elements . Later, however, as
concern for political stability gave way to a fear of physical and mental degeneracy,
the quasi-scientific ideas of the eugenics movement were used to justify the
institutional policies increasingly endorsed if not fully implemented . That this
model was dislodged by community strategies is attributed primarily to the economic costs of residential care and to the twentieth-century growth in the Labour
Party and the co-operative and trade union movements, which made `socialised
labour' a more immediate threat than mental handicap .
In the second paper, this historical legacy is applied to the `lived experience' of
contemporary families with mentally handicapped children . The data are drawn
from two small but in-depth studies carried out in 1981 and 1982, and discussion
centres around reactions to disability and the mother's lifestyle . Of particular
interest is comparison with a third, roughly matched sample of families whose
children have not been labelled as mentally handicapped . Adaptation, short-term in
response to the child's birth and long-term as the family revised its future plans, was
a greater preoccupation in the `mental handicap' sample than among the controls .