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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
Book Reviews
305
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
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) .