ABSTRACT
Understanding Disability Throughout History explores seldom-heard voices from the past by studying the hidden lives of disabled people before the concept of disability existed culturally, socially and administratively.
The book focuses on Iceland from the Age of Settlement, traditionally considered to have taken place from 874 to 930, until the 1936 Law on Social Security (Lög um almannatryggingar), which is the first time that disabled people were referenced in Iceland as a legal or administrative category. Data sources analysed in the project represent a broad range of materials that are not often featured in the study of disability, such as bone collections, medieval literature and census data from the early modern era, archaeological remains, historical archives, folktales and legends, personal narratives and museum displays. The ten chapters include contributions from multidisciplinary team of experts working in the fields of Disability Studies, History, Archaeology, Medieval Icelandic Literature, Folklore and Ethnology, Anthropology, Museum Studies, and Archival Sciences, along with a collection of post-doctoral and graduate students.
The volume will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, history, medieval studies, ethnology, folklore, and archaeology.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
By Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir, James G. Rice
Abstract
The introduction provides the required background information about this volume for the readers. This includes some details about the “Disability before Disability” project upon which Understanding Disability Throughout History: Interdisciplinary perspectives in Iceland from Settlement to 1936 is based, such as the project’s goals and methodology. This is followed by a short overview of disability studies and its development since the 1980s, as well as some criticisms that have been raised about the discipline’s engagement with history. The introduction then provides some brief historical background about Iceland, with a specific focus on social conditions and marginalized populations. The introduction concludes with an overview of each research strand of the project that is represented in this volume – History, Folklore/Ethnology, Archaeology, Museum Studies, Medieval Icelandic Literature – and their engagement with Disability Studies, as well as a brief overview of the subject matter of each chapter.
Disability in Medieval Iceland
Some methodological concerns
By Christopher Crocker, Yoav Tirosh, Ármann Jakobsson
Abstract
Disability and quality of life in the past was approached through case studies of skeletonised individuals from the monastic site, Skriðuklaustur in East Iceland (AD 1494–1554). Historical archaeology and osteological data were used simultaneously to identify bodily impairments visible on the skeleton and to make interpretations about the potentially disabling conditions associated with them. This chapter seeks to examine how impairments may have led to social disability and how society may have perceived people with such impairments. It likewise seeks to consider the how impaired and/or disabled individuals may have adapted to the biological limitations and potentially subsequent social marginalisation. The study results show that the impairments themselves answer little about social attitudes and past perspectives on disability but do nonetheless provide indications about life experience and the possible functional limitations these individuals may have faced. The cases used show at least that people had some reason to seek medical care there instead of staying at their relative’s residency, showing that disability lies in between the lines of impairment and temporal social perspectives.
Disability in archaeological and osteobiographical contexts
By Steinunn Kristjánsdóttir, Joe W. Walser
Abstract
Disability and quality of life in the past was approached through case studies of skeletonised individuals from the monastic site, Skriðuklaustur in East Iceland (AD 1494–1554). Historical archaeology and osteological data were used simultaneously to identify bodily impairments visible on the skeleton and to make interpretations about the potentially disabling conditions associated with them. This chapter seeks to examine how impairments may have led to social disability and how society may have perceived people with such impairments. It likewise seeks to consider the how impaired and/or disabled individuals may have adapted to the biological limitations and potentially subsequent social marginalisation. The study results show that the impairments themselves answer little about social attitudes and past perspectives on disability but do nonetheless provide indications about life experience and the possible functional limitations these individuals may have faced. The cases used show at least that people had some reason to seek medical care there instead of staying at their relative’s residency, showing that disability lies in between the lines of impairment and temporal social perspectives.
The importance of micro/bio research for disability studies
By Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon
Abstract
This chapter discusses the importance of doing microhistory approach when looking at the lives of disabled individuals and serves to contextualise the chapters to follow in this section. Micro historians emphasize the importance of placing small units of research within larger contexts. Instead, this chapter will consider whether this research focus excludes historical inquiry that has its focus on only one person, only one story. This scholarly research model provides the opportunity to slow down the research process, to examine each fragment of knowledge, and place it in the context of other knowledge possessed by the researcher. The basis of the slow ideology is precisely the opposite of this: not to seek to smooth out people’s rough surfaces, but to find opportunities to demonstrate the positive side of the fact that not everything, and everyone, is the same.
The Peculiar Attitude of the People
The life and social conditions of one “feebleminded” girl in the early 20th century
By Guðrún V. Stefánsdóttir, Sólveig Ólafsdóttir
Abstract
Bíbí is the nickname of Bjargey Kristjánsdóttir, an Icelandic woman born in 1927, died in 1999. She grew up on a small farm called Berlin in Northern Iceland. After falling seriously ill before her first birthday, Bíbí was labelled “feebleminded” by her family and the local community. In her early years Bíbí was ostracized within the home and hidden from visitors. Bíbí wrote her own autobiography, keeping it secret from her family and neighbours. The autobiography evinces intelligence and insight into her life and circumstances. In this chapter, Bíbí’s childhood story is analysed based on two research disciplines: 1) critical disability studies and 2) microhistory. By connecting these two research fields, we will provide a new critical thinking about disability, as well as history. A feminist intersectionality framework is used to analyse Bíbí’s childhood story. The primary aim of this chapter is to shed light on the hidden history of people with intellectual disabilities, especially, girls in Iceland in the first half of the 20th century and, more specifically, to explore how social class, disability and gender intersected and impacted Bíbí’s childhood. We also reflect on how Bíbí’s autobiography appears as a counter narrative that resists negative historical beliefs and stereotypes of people with intellectual disabilities. For this purpose, in addition to Bíbí’s autobiography, we use various official records, such as church records, parish registers, and annual reports from her local community.
From a Life With a Different Body to a Recreated Folklore of Accentuated Difference
Sigríður Benediksdóttir versus Stutta-Sigga
By Eva Þórdís Ebenezersdóttir, Sólveig Ólafsdóttir
Abstract
Disability understanding is ever changing through history. Stories, narratives, and histories, are important supportive threads in the tapestry that is disability understanding through time. Locating and evaluating historical understandings of disability is a task of unravelling varied strands of material where such understanding can be found. This chapter tells the story of Sigríður Benediksdóttir (1815–1900) drawn from folkloric legends, micro historical analysis of official documents and the usages of the only photograph that exists of Sigríður. The research exposes disabling elements formed and stored in narratives that affected her life and are still affecting the idea of her character and the understanding of disability. The approach developed here by combining disability studies, microhistory and folkloristics in a research design based on advocacy worldview, shows an intertwined and complex social play between the lived experience of difference and the living tradition of tales of difference. In the end a new thread is weaved into the tapestry and disability understanding of Sigríður story by retelling the narrative from place of empowerment and disability art.
Absencepresence as matters that matter
By Arndís Bergsdóttir
Abstract
This chapter engages with finding traces of disability in Icelandic museums, mostly the National Museum of Iceland, and how can we understand disability in the past from Museum Studies. The formal objective is twofold: To investigate the material collection and cataloguing system of the National Museum of Iceland between the years 1863–1936. The cataloguing system is created and operated on museological practices and nationalistic ideology (a cultural system) that create questions about presence and interpretation of histories and narratives of disability. The second objective is to gain insights that are the product of entangled knowledge making practices. Mining through the depositories of the National Museum of Iceland has yielded surprisingly meagre results, at least in terms of present material objects: the stuff that museum narratives are made of. What seems, however, to be abundant is absence – an absence of the lived lives and experiences of disabled people throughout the country’s histories. Therefore, this chapter engages with matters of absence in relation to museums and dis-/abled people’s histories.
Health, Healing, and the Social Body in Medieval Iceland
By Christopher Crocker, Yoav Tiros
Abstract
This chapter concerns matters of health and healing in medieval Iceland, drawing particularly on the corpus of texts known as the Íslendingasögur (Sagas of Early Icelanders). In light of the harmful stigma often arising from perceptions of poor health and/or disability, this chapter first elaborates on the appropriateness of adopting a disability studies approach to this subject. Following this, it discusses how the Íslendingasögur show an awareness of both practical and theoretical understandings of the body and are concerned with how this knowledge was applied, as well as who had access to this knowledge and practice. Bodies or minds in the sagas perceived to be unhealthy, and consequently also their healthy counterparts, are understood and depicted not only as physiological phenomena but also as reflections of a variety of socio-cultural factors. The importance of healing and maintaining a healthy body takes on a social aspect and plays a crucial role in the formation (and dissolution) of a variety of interpersonal relationships.
By Ólafur Rastrick
Abstract
A number of studies exploring disability and housing address the question of how design and layout of dwelling and home environment affects the quality of life of persons with physical impairments. While these studies mostly focus on contemporary predicaments this chapter addresses the social space of disability in the traditional rural household in Iceland. The discussion rests on the premises that pre-industrial Icelandic economy was almost entirely household-based till the late 1800s and that a substantial part of everyday life of the general population was confined to the social space of the farm. Drawing on case-based evidence the chapter explores the production of social space within the vernacular architecture of the turf-house with regard to social participation and activity of individuals with physical impairments. The chapter maintains that the spatial design of the turf-house and the plasticity of its architecture, in conjunction with specific socio-economic factors, effected a distinct dynamic relationship between space and “different” bodies. In conclusion the chapter argues that the social space of the turf-house did in significant ways have a less disabling effect on people with physical impairments than the spatial design of the urbanised society that supplanted it.
By Alice Bower
Abstract
This article seeks to examine the legend-making process in the case of the disabled poet Guðmundur Bergþórsson within the Icelandic vernacular narrative culture of the past three centuries. To this end, Guðmundur Bergþórsson’s life following his illness at the age of four will be examined through texts written both by the poet himself and his contemporaries, to enable a better understanding of the initial framework laid for later generations of storytellers. Consideration will be given to understandings of disability in pre-industrial Icelandic society and how they feature in narratives about Guðmundur’s life. A selection of texts collected by folklorists in the 19th and 20th centuries will then be subjected to critical analysis, as established motifs, such as maternal culpability, dark magic, and supernatural cures make an appearance in relation to Guðmundur’s disability. Guðmundur’s own artistic agency in narratives about his disability, or lack thereof, will be subjected to particular scrutiny as a living poet makes the transition to a memory and eventually folkloric figure in vernacular oral narrative.
Fictive Osteobiographical Narrative – The Missing Puzzle Pieces
ByHaraldur Thor Hammer Haraldsson
Abstract
This chapter describes the process of building a fictive osteobiographical narrative, which is a method to address subjects which are unavailable or invisible in the current accessible research data. This method utilises various analytical results garnered from bioarchaeology, or the study of human skeletal remains, and all relevant literary sources, in conjunction with cautious interpretations on specific subjects not directly observed in the available data. Such unobservable data are for example physical pain, embodied experiences, and societal perceptions towards the different bodied, and vice versa. All this is used to construct a holistic and personal account of a particular human being via an easily accessible medium, a short, evidence based, and yet fictive story. This chapter goes through the process of piecing together the available data – the puzzle pieces, from both archaeological and historical sources, about a mature man who lived 1000 years ago, who was likely born paralysed in the left side of his body. This chapter will demonstrate, by utilizing the fictive osteobiographical narrative method, how the available data can showcase the visible, highlight the unobservable, and give voice to those who are long gone.
DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003180180
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OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Ninon Dubourg (sharing info) (2 novembre 2021). New book – Understanding Disability Throughout History. Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Iceland from Settlement to 1936 – ed. by Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir, James G. Rice, Routledge, 2021. History of Disease, Disability & Medicine in Medieval Europe. Consulté le 9 octobre 2024 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/nnz2