Disability in Antiquity

Christian Laes, Christian Laes

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317231530
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Ancient History

This volume is a major contribution to the field of disability history in the ancient world. Contributions from leading international scholars examine deformity and disability from a variety of historical, sociological and theoretical perspectives, as represented in various media. The volume is not confined to a narrow view of 'antiquity' but includes a large number of pieces on ancient western Asia that provide a broad and comparative view of the topic and enable scholars to see this important topic in the round.

Disability in Antiquity is the first multidisciplinary volume to truly map out and explore the topic of disability in the ancient world and create new avenues of thought and research.

1
Introduction

Disabilities in the ancient world – past, present and future

Christian Laes

The bridge on the Drina

Be it as a literary device or simply as a commonplace, bridges have always been popular to denote communication and understanding between people of different time periods, places or cultures. A beautiful example is seen in Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge on the Drina), a superb novel in Serbo-Croatian by the Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andrić (1892–1975), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961. It tells the story of the town of Višegrad in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its famous Mehmed Paša Sokolović bridge over the Drina river. The story spans about four centuries during the Ottoman and subsequent Austro-Hungarian administrations of the region. In wonderful detail and with a sense of mild humour, it describes the lives, destinies and relations of the local inhabitants, with a particular focus on Muslims and Orthodox Christians living together in Višegrad.

To a historian of disabilities, the book is no less than a goldmine. They are all there. A one-legged, one-eyed and one-eared war veteran had capabilities that were enough to make him the guardsman of the bridge, the monument which was considered the jewel of the town from its building in the early Ottoman years of Mehmed Paša. An impoverished and deaf-mute girl was seen as mentally retarded. Despite this (or rather because of it) she was sexually harassed. She became pregnant and gave birth to twins; the father remained unknown. The mere threat of torture by the Ottoman authorities after an attempt to sabotage the bridge caused a traumatized official to go mad. ‘At least I was not tortured’ was the only phrase he kept uttering during his rages of madness. Another unnamed deaf-mute and retarded boy was known for his performing tricks on the bridge. One day he was punished by his elder brother with a severe beating ‘as if he were a little kid’. Sometimes, disabled people got along well in jobs and daily life. A mullah was known for his severe stuttering, but at the same time he was a great and wise adviser to many who were in need. A skilled blacksmith is described as a giant with the brains of a chicken.

And surely, at least some of these disabled people were taken care of. After the death of his mother, a gypsy boy, whose father was an officer who had left the town soon after the baby was born, took the role of the son of the whole community. He was never given a surname, but he received food that was donated by almost everybody at different moments, and in many ways he functioned as the city’s jester or fool. Towards the end of the novel, when Višegrad is living its last days as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, we read about a mentally retarded and crippled boy who could hardly stand on his feet. He was born when his mother was already of considerable age. Nevertheless, the bustling Galician Jewish hotel keeper Lottika took care of him in her old age, and in the end she only regretted two things: that she had never been able to send him to a specialized institution such as existed in Vienna, and that God had never helped her or the poor boy.

Andrić’s book even describes what we would now call social disabilities, caused by prejudice in society. Gypsies are a telling example of this: their children were rumoured not to have souls, which explained their crude behaviour of putting a cigar in the mouth of the decapitated priest whose head was displayed on the bridge. Another gypsy boy could not resist his own appetites and ate himself to death during a city celebration with a free distribution of food. In the local inn, one could encounter the one-eyed gypsy Corkan, unlucky in love, dancing drunk on the parapet, or Saha, a squint-eyed gypsy virago, who was a better drinker than any other male customer.

There is a risk that a historian of disabilities would promptly lay this volume aside, after reading my first enthusiastic introductory remarks on a novel which was admittedly a literary sensation to me. And also a more general audience might reasonably question my motives for writing these opening paragraphs. Indeed, one does not expect a volume on disabilities in Antiquity to be anything more than an enumeration of ‘remarkable’ case stories, which either offer a glimpse of recognition, or give way to the self-confident feeling that ‘we’ surely handle things in a better way than ‘the people of the past’. Not that there is nothing to be learnt for an ancient historian from the examples cited by Andrić: some of the anecdotes I selected are indeed illustrative of the longue durée and it is not unreasonable to imagine scenarios which were not very different in towns or villages in Antiquity. The Bridge on the Drina is also sensitive to the topic of continuity and change over four centuries in Višegrad. Andrić nicely describes how the ceding of Bosnia-Herzegovina to Austria-Hungary in 1878 changed the daily lives of the inhabitants of the town at the river, which came under the Habsburgian protectorate. Streetlights appeared, and the new regime put a great emphasis on cleanliness and personal hygiene. People from all parts of the Austro-Hungarian kingdom arrived, opening their businesses and bringing new customs with them. A railway line was built to Sarajevo which reduced the significance of the bridge. Children now went to Sarajevo for education. Newspapers spread news from all over the world, and at least Lottika was aware of the existence of special asylums for people with mental conditions in the capital of Vienna. On the other hand, inside the walls of the houses of the mixed Serbian, Turkish, Jewish and gypsy population, not too many things changed. When the First World War broke out, the bridge again became of crucial importance. Being on the frontline of the conflict, it was evacuated by the Austrians and eventually partly blown up. Restored, it stands as one of the beautiful tourist highlights of present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina. As the Ivo Andrić foundation proclaims on its website:

The Bridge on the Drina can be seen as a portrait of history itself. History is made as much by individual personalities as by mass movements … The clearest implication of the broad time-scale is the predictable one in Andrić’s work: that, for all these events and changes, nothing of significance alters.

<http://www.ivoandric.org.rs/html/the_bridge_on_the_drina.html>

I would like to justify these somewhat unusual first paragraphs in four main points.

For many periods and regions, disability studies in the ancient world are only at the very beginning phase. Searching for ‘interesting and significative cases’ is in this situation the first thing to do. Hopefully, the mere joy of recognizing such particular instances of disabilities as I experienced when reading Andrić’s novel will be transferred to the readers who consult this volume.

Secondly, the force of anecdotal evidence often lies in the presenting agency of the people concerned – a virtue which will be demonstrated in at least some contributions of this volume (cf. the recent plea for study of agency by Marx-Wolf and Upson-Saia 2015: 246).

Thirdly, from the very start, this volume was meant to be comparative, by referring to cultures which existed before or were contemporary with Greco-Roman civilization, with an eye open for continuity and change of the classical tradition in later times.

Fourthly and finally, this volume is grounded in the belief that there is such a thing as disability, that it is not merely a social construct characterized by perceptions of people living in a specific region or area. As such, the bridge on the Drina not only stands as a symbol of Andrić’s views on history and human existence, but also characterizes the present volume which will indeed build bridges between people of different times and civilizations.

A short history of the history of disabilities

By 2010, disability studies had been institutionalized in several countries.¹ Specialized chairs are devoted to the subject. At its best, scholars specializing in the branch are at the intersection of history, educational, political and social science departments, even though the historical and much needed philosophical dimensions are sometimes lacking. There are specialized journals devoted to the subject. Disabled scholars and their allies have stood up for their civil rights, and even such specific genres as disability poetry have developed and been studied. Combining insights from disciplines as sociology, psychology and anthropology, a sophisticated methodology and terminology has come to the fore, especially in literary criticism.

Yet it would be inaccurate to state that scholarly attention to the matter of disability is a recent phenomenon. On the contrary, already by the first decades of the 20th century, both doctors and historians of medicine were eager to ‘find’ the disabled in historical sources. As a compilation, their studies are still valuable, though they obviously took their own categories of physical and mental ‘abnormality’ for granted throughout the human past. Also, ‘recognizing’ diseases or disabilities from historical written records is not as easy as it may seem to be. Here, the problem of retrospective diagnosis comes in. Challenging this medicalized approach in the 1980s, the earliest scholars in the new field studied the complex interactions among cultural values, social organization, public policy and professional practice regarding people with impairments. Instead of a history of medicine, disability studies took the form of social history. By the 1990s, these investigations into disability developed into a new disability history, focused on concepts of otherness. Now, scholars viewed disability on the model of gender, race or ethnicity. As such, disability studies had become able to contribute to our understanding of the way in which western cultures constructed hierarchy and social order. Current disability history, too, often takes into account Foucauldian structures of power and oppression. In the last decade, disability historians have been increasingly interested in memoirs and autobiographies, records left by disabled people themselves. Agency became a matter of crucial importance, though for this approach there is the problem of a nearly complete absence of source material for some periods and civilizations on the one hand, and the strong presence of internalized discriminatory judgement in the surviving records on the other. Indeed, ‘normalcy’ often seems to be imposed on people. Also, disability studies developed into a multicultural world approach. The five-volume Encyclopaedia of Disabilities was a big enterprise involving scholars of many nationalities and including editorial work in New Delhi. For quite a few regions which remain ‘exotic’ to western scholars, the entries in this encyclopedia provided the first and in some cases still the only access (Albrecht 2006).

Taken all together, the various waves of disability studies have made historians aware that disability is a concept which has been constructed differently in different periods and cultures. They have also changed the vocabulary used in approaching the subject, drawing a distinction between disability – essentially a social and cultural construct – and impairment, which points to physiological and biological characteristics. One can be born impaired, in the sense that one is not able to walk. But it is social forces that either make this person disabled or enables him. Access for wheelchairs and other architectural accommodation means that in some countries users of a wheelchair are much more ‘able’ than people of other regions who for example may have once broken a leg and consequently experience difficulties in moving around for the rest of their lives (Metzler 2006 has scrupulously discerned between impairment and disability in her study of medieval disabilities). Others have criticized even this model as too constructivist (thereby again pointing to bodily similarities through the centuries) or because it omits the fact that impairment is culturally defined too.²

What is disability? The crux of the matter

Before expanding on issues such as content, methodological approaches or organization of this volume, any book approaching the matter of disability in the pre-industrial past should insist on making two crucial points to its readers.

First, disability is a recent term, one which profoundly characterizes attitudes and approaches of modern western civilization. The focus lies on the body’s physical and cognitive limitations that render it unable or unfit for work. In any modern state which typically views itself as ‘healthy’, such a condition is considered undesirable. Pre-modern concepts, on the contrary, focus on bodies being marked or blighted by physical or mental deviance, both in Antiquity and in the early Islamic world (Laes 2014; Richardson 2012). Therefore, infirmity is much more appropriate as a term for pre-modern society. Such infirmity was a highly fluid, differentiating category, often used ad hoc and mostly defined in the context of a person’s social role (Kuuliala et al. 2015: 5–7). Indeed, it is only the modern states from the 18th century on that focused on the ‘hygiene’ of their population, and the moral duty of their citizens to keep themselves healthy. State-organized medicine involved rights and duties, and the question of costs entered the equation. Surely, the benefits of the development in health care in the industrial period were considerable, and impaired people were often looked after in a more efficient and professional way. But along with this, the concept of guilt became much more pronounced. Doesn’t the modern western condemnation of smokers, alcoholics or obese people stem largely from the idea that ‘they cost us a lot’, and that with some self-restraint on their part much of these expenses could be lowered? And isn’t the whole discussion on abortion and disability – the question of who should and who should not inhabit the world (Hubbard 2013) – very much connected to an utilitarian approach of functioning in human society, enforced by the diagnostic possibilities of pre-natal medicine? Industrialized states divided handicaps and disabilities into categories, entitling people to basic rights and benefits as well as support from social welfare. In the present day, this process is part of a tendency towards social integration. Indeed, categorization need not always imply exclusion. Inclusion, however, is a fairly recent development, and discussions about the desirability of including disabled children in schools, for example, are ongoing in quite a few western countries.

All of these fluctuations are reflected in vocabulary, too. The now somewhat unfashionable term handicap is recent, with the first reference dating from the 17th century in the context of a game of chance (Laes 2014: 14). Two players would place their hands in a cap. An open hand meant that the deal had been accepted, and a closed hand indicated refusal. The first player to withdraw an open hand from the cap would receive the objects, plus the money that had been wagered. If both players revealed an open hand, the referee won the money. The term also appears in the context of horse racing. In order to make races more exciting and balanced, bookmakers in the period after the First World War starting assigning additional weight to stronger horses or allowing a head start to slower animals. The massive amounts of disabled war veterans after...