2023 Volume 87 Issue 4 Pages 624-641
Cultural anthropology's study of disability views it from a comparative cross-cultural perspective. It has criticized the Western-centeredness of disability policy and movements. Such studies risk reproducing a dichotomy between the West, with its well-organized welfare systems, and the non-West, with its less-organized ones. Its primary focus has been on physical disability, while few studies have focused on people with severe intellectual disabilities. This paper introduces an "insufficiently well-organized" perspective to overcome the dichotomy between societies with and without well-organized welfare systems. The paper focuses on the practices of people with severe intellectual disabilities who live independently in contemporary Japan using the critical disability studies perspective. By depicting the process by which the intentions of people with severe intellectual disabilities are expressed in coordination with other people and things, symbiosis is presented not as an abstract norm but as a tangible entity embedded in space.
