The following video is truly impacting. It is broken into two parts. The first part, entitled 'In My Language,' shows A M Baggs, an autistic woman, doing things that would make most of us consider her somehow abnormal and maybe even retarded. Then the second part provides something of a translation designed to make the first part more intelligible to us, but more than a translation it is an explanation, and more than an explanation it is a highly eloquent personal statement on what it might mean to communicate, to have cognitive capacities, to think, and to be a person, while simultaneously criticizing the paradigm of so-called normality.
Since I'm teaching a few ethics courses this semester, and it's very fresh in my mind, I couldn't help but associate her statement to Ruth Benedict's classic paper "Anthropology and the Abnormal," which you can download
here.
My only problem with this is that just as Baggs criticizes us for presuming to know what's on her mind, she also presumes to know what's on the minds of other autistic people, which seems rather contradictory, but even if she were to limit her remarks to her own case for the sake of consistency, her insights are still truly wonderful.
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Thanks for posting this video as it seems that there still might be a few people on the planet who missed it.
ReplyDeleteCertainly changing people's perspectives for the better.
BEst wishes
The video was great - and unfortunate that she has to type in order for us to find her of value to this world. People who are autistic are generally brilliant - and at the same time hyper-sensitive. I believe I read a book where another autistic individual had been able to write about her experiences, describing the way in which she sees our hair - almost like spaghetti waving in the wind, by touching a fuzzy blanket she actually feels it throughout her entire body...almost like being on a perpetual acid trip, yet they are forced to "snap out" of their world of sensation in order to meet our demands of progress. This is one of my areas of expertise, or rather hoping that I will eventually become an expert in this subject, persuing a neuroscience degree in an attempt to study completely the phenomena that is the most rapidly growing "ailment" of our society, though I would never call it such. My brother is autistic - and watching A M Baggs is almost like living in my parents house again - almost everything that she had illustrated to us in her rituals - my brother shows remarkable similarities in behavior as well. To doubt whether all autistic individuals hold her point of view might be hasty because until now I could not come up with an explanation for his daily routines. I may be seeking to find meaning in what he does in a selfish need to understand someone that I love dearly, but at the same time I know that he is a remarkably intelligent man, so A M Baggs interpretation fits. He taught himself to read when he was young, he has a wonderful sense of humor (especially when I used to get yelled at for any of my misdeeds - I definitely kept him entertained throughout high school!) - and just recently I noticed that he is teaching himself Spanish by watching a movie that he has memorized in English, and then watching it in Spanish by switching the language on the remote. I had asked him if this is what he is doing and he laughed and gave me his knowing smile and said, "yes, learn Spanish". My brother links three words, at most, together at a time, yet he has tried to assimilate into our culture for our benefit. The school system had taken away his most useful attempt to communicate - "facilitated communication", saying that in fact it was the aids who were guiding the hand by type-writer and not the autistic children at all. Then how is it that in school my brother would type family secrets that no one else would know, unless they were psychics like Ruth Benedict had spoke of?! My goal is to find a method of communication that would not be intrusive into their environmental language, hopefully lifting the curtain of mystery that surrounds them, and once and for all showing the world that in fact - they are not retarded. They are brilliant people that might be able to teach us one day - if we can learn the language.
ReplyDeleteI certainly do not mean to demean anyone with what I am about to say, but I do think it's a hasty generalization to think of autism as a monolithic condition that is manifested in all autistics in the same way.
ReplyDeleteSure, some of them are brilliant, in some sense of the word, but I'm not sure it follows from this that they are all brilliant. More likely, I think, is that they may cover a wider range of capacities than we are used to recognizing, without necessarily implying, however, that because the population spectrum is larger, each individual also fits into this larger spectrum.
I have a couple more videos of very talented autistics, so keep your eyes open for those future entries!
Though there may be cases that fall outside of my generalization, from my experience and from others that I have studied, it does happen to be the case that half of all savant syndromed individuals are autistic. By saying savant syndrome, I'm sure you're familiar with the term, I mean that a mark of brilliance in a particular area stands in contrast to his/her disability. My brother can speed read and get 100% of the answers right in a questionaire that follows afer the read. He is also remarkable at mechanics (fixing everything in the house), not to mention the language learning that I had spoke of earlier. Another person I tutored was in Calculus - he was a whiz at that as well. There are many that I have volunteered with that show marks of brilliance in many different facets.
ReplyDeleteTo make a generalization, one assumes that it is not meant to include every single case, so if it does fall under that fallacy, I apologize for not making the destinction. I look forward to the upcoming videos.