Spurred by the United Nation's International Decade for Disabled Persons and medical anthropology's coming of age, anthropologists have recently begun to explore the effects of culture on the lives of the mentally and physically impaired. This major collection of essays both reframes disability in terms of social processes and offers for the first time a global, multicultural perspective on the subject. Using research undertaken in a wide variety of settings--from a longhouse in central Borneo to a community of Turkish immigrants in Stockholm--contributors explore the significance of mental,...

The lives of many disabled people in Europe and North America have improved over the past two decades through innovative technologies and the efforts of the disability rights movement. These changes have been spreading to other societies around the globe--albeit unevenly. In this collection of essays, leading scholars explore global changes in disability awareness, technology, and policy from the viewpoint of disabled people and their families in a wide range of local contexts. The authors report on ethnographic research in Brazil, Uganda, Botswana, Somalia, Britain, Israel, China, Egypt,...

In 1960, Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad made a discovery that rewrote the history of European exploration and colonization of North America - a thousand-year-old Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. In A Grand Adventure, the Ingstads' daughter Benedicte tells the story of their remarkable lives spent working together, sharing poignant details from her parents' private letters, personal diaries, their dinner table conversations, and Benedicte's own participation in her parents' excavations. Following young Helge Ingstad from his 1926 decision to abandon a successful law...