The Ecology of Disabled Minds in Urban Uganda

ABSTRACT

In this article, I analyze what I call the ecology of disabled minds in urban Uganda. This analytic notion allows me to account for the way that an interactive web of people, cultural expectations, historical changes, official discourses, and institutional resources collectively contribute to the manifestation of certain forms of human difference as unusual, as cognitive, and as disabilities. Such a notion further allows me to make sense of a set of puzzles I encountered during fieldwork, and to track the emergence of new kinds of minds in contemporary Uganda.

KEYWORDS:

• Uganda
• cognitive disability
• personhood
• theory of mind
• classification

Acknowledgments

My first debt is to the people I write about here. Another debt is owed to Caroline Meier zu Biesen, Nasima Selim, Claudia Lang, and Dominik Mattes, who inspired the framing of this article by inviting me to present at a 2019 conference on “Ecologies of Mind in (Mental) Health” in Berlin. More generally, I am grateful to Sandra Calkins, Patrick McKearney, Julia Modern, Boaz Muhumza, Florence Namaganda, Patrick Ojok, Susan Reynolds Whyte, Rose Yooumbe, and Anna Zogas. Finally, this article has benefitted from the engagement of the journal, including the anonymous reviewers, Lenore Manderson, and Victoria Team.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. I draw the figure of ecology of disabled minds from Gregory Bateson’s (1972) famous reflections on “ecology of mind.” Yet I am not following Bateson’s rather grand ambitions to understand mind as an immanent property of systems ranging from individual organisms to the planet as a whole. Instead, I use a looser sense of “ecology” in order to think about disability as something that arises through a network of interactive relations.

2. This broad contrast in contemporary understandings of autism holds true even when acknowledging that understandings of autism in the Global North remain historically shifting, variable inter- and intra-nationally, and highly contested (e.g., Cascio 2015; Grinker 2008; Silverman 2011).

3. This recalls Lawrence Cohen’s (1998) observations about the ways that the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s in India can help deflect some of the blame and stigma placed on families for cases of “madness.”

4. I owe this line of questioning to Julia Modern.

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible by the generous support of New York University, the National Science Foundation, the Society for Psychological Anthropology and the Lemelson Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Tyler Zoanni

Tyler Zoanni is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bayreuth who has worked in Uganda since 2014, and whose interests include disability, religion and politics, kinship, aesthetics, political theory, medical anthropology, and visual anthropology