Richard Grinker, PhD

Author of Unstrange Minds and Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University

Well, I find that understanding the context in which a person has autism or which a person has any developmental disorder or psychiatric disorder is crucial. Because a diagnosis is only going to be given if it's meaningful. If you have a society in which the word autism — the concept autism — has no meaning...has no meaning, because they’re unfamiliar with psychiatric frameworks or unfamiliar because there are no services for people with those particular forms of distress or impairment, then that term won’t be used. And so the context is everything. And when we look today at the United States, and we see that we have Disorder X here or Disorder Y, we are often lulled into the idea that this is something that is actually in nature. It’s a stable entity and not [the] product of the particular time that we’re in. It’s really important, I think, from an anthropological perspective to understand that whatever we call something, whatever we call any phenomenon — any human behavior — is determined by many, many factors acting in concert together. The kind of infrastructure we have, the kind of services that are available, the way we think about children and childhood, and so on. We cannot reduce our knowledge of human behavior to just one area. We need to see, therefore, the rise of autism as a meaningful diagnosis as existing within a whole matrix of different forces.