Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to raise for discussion some philosophical and ethical considerations that should be useful for scholars engaged in the bioarchaeology of care. Keeping within this scope, the author discusses the following questions regarding the early development of the field within the last decades: What were the main reactions in the archaeological literature to discussion of past caregiving? What beliefs and values were the first objections to inferences of care based on? Are the beliefs and values informing the recently developed bioarchaeology of care model of analysis sufficiently robust to overcome past criticism? As moral beliefs, goals and values may sometimes be kept buried under the ground of explicit arguments which shape the academic discussion in the field, it is the job of the philosopher both to analyse such arguments and to excavate the presuppositions on which they are founded. From a social perspective, this is of importance, as philosophical and ethical beliefs underlying the work of archaeologists in the field may influence the way they position themselves with regard to the development of new narratives and theoretical models in the bioarchaeology of care.
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Notes
- 1.
Lennard Davis, one of the most important scholars in the disability studies, states that ‘impairment is not a neutral and easily understood term. It relies heavily on a medical model for the diagnosis of the impairment. […] Particularly with illnesses that did not exist in the past, the plethora of syndromes and conditions that have sprouted in the hearts and minds of physicians and patients […] we have to question the clear line drawn between the socially constructed ‘disability ’ and the preexistent and somatic ‘impairment.’ Davis finally asks: ‘Is the impairment bred into the bone, or can it be a creation of a medical-technological-pharmaceutical complex?’’ (Davis, 2006, pp. 237–238).
- 2.
Renfrew uses in her original chapter the term ‘handicapped’ to designate the disabled members of a prehistoric hominid community. In the context of the quotation, the term is inappropriate. I have replaced ‘handicapped’ with ‘disabled’, since the latter is the descriptor used (at the time of Refrew’s publication) by the WHO International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) (2001). Regarding differences on terminologies between English-speaking countries, I have used both the terms ‘disabled persons’ (GB) and ‘persons with disabilities’ (USA, Australia) in the chapter. I have avoided the term ‘the disabled’ which is sometimes regarded as pejorative.
- 3.
Battles (2011) and Gleeson (1999) evoke such a risk of circularity as follows: although ‘[there] is value for today’s society in investigating disability in the more distant past’ (Battles, 2011, p. 113), the historiography of disability studies ‘has burdened the field with a number of […] orthodoxies about the social context of impairment in previous societies’ (Gleeson, 1999, p. 23). Such orthodoxies, which increased in anthropology in the twentieth century, present disabled people’s contemporary exclusion, marginality and poverty ‘by depicting them as fixed, historical conditions that have been present in most, even all, past human societies’. Accordingly, given widespread assumptions of cross-cultural stigma and social exclusion of disabled people in history, ‘contemporary views are based on assumptions about disability in the past such as that ‘they’ (people with disabilities) would not have survived under […] harsh, ‘natural’ circumstances […] (Battles, 2011, p. 113) such as those met in early prehistoric hominin communities. Given these orthodoxies, scholars may be led to think that it would be a priori unrealistic – and another non-disabled denial of a universal social condition of exclusion disabled persons experience – to interpret evidence of survival of disabled persons in prehistory as a possible indication of inclusive – or benevolent, compassionate, respectful – caregiving behaviours. To be morally and politically minimally acceptable with regard to postmodern sensibilities, care provision should be interpreted at least as just another means to deny disabled people’s right to develop an autonomous and independent life. To avoid naturalization of pessimistic postmodern disability narratives, Battles (2011, p. 113) claims, at the risk of being politically incorrect: ‘Anthropological investigations could refute […] orthodoxies and contribute to denaturalizing the relationship between impairment and social disadvantage, inequality, and dependency’.
- 4.
When questioning the very possibility to find empirical traces of the emergence of human moral behaviour, Stephen Jay Gould wrote: ‘We have bones aplenty, but they speak to us in limited and muted ways. (…) We yearn to know how and when [this] distinctively human [trait] of […] moral decency entered our history. We wish, in short, to disinter the ‘good’ that lies in the bones. But goodness doesn’t fossilize. (…) Since decency […] [makes] no fossils directly, the challenge for explorers of [this] most important and elusive [aspect] of human history lies in developing criteria of inference from material record. Bones tell us something. What then can we learn of compassion from a study of bones and artifacts? A remarkable discovery has just been reported from this domain of more circumstantial evidence. The November 5, 1987, issue of Nature […] announced the finding of an unusual skeleton from Romito, an Italian cave deposit some 11,000 years old. […] If we consider care of the handicapped (particularly at some cost of caretakers) as a key attribute of humanity, the Romito people surely practiced compassion at this level.’ (Gould, 1988, pp. 16–18.). Given the antiquity of prehistoric empirical indication of caregiving behaviours, Gould states then elsewhere in his text that though progress has occurred in technology, compassionate behaviour is not a question of progress: ‘We have developed a technology to aid the [disabled], but our compassion may span the age’ (p. 20). When considering the traditional criteria for human worthiness, a cross-cultural and trans-historical category should then be added: ‘To art and symbol, […] we should add a third category, for our usual definition of human worthiness includes kindness as well as cognition.’ (p. 18).
- 5.
My own personal experience is strongly dependent on daily living with cognitive disabled adults who were fully included in the community where I lived for several years. Despite human vulnerabilities and complexity experienced in any common life, this is partly why I do not share a pessimistic view on relationship between disabled and non-disabled persons in human communities. Nevertheless, I am not naïve and I have also experienced exclusion, denial of autonomy and stigmatization of persons with disabilities. Such behaviours have to be fought in any society, and this is one of my strongest political and moral engagement, as I think a humane society must be fully inclusive.
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Acknowledgments
I particularly want to thank Cécile Mathieu, Nathanaël and Camille Doat for discussions and support during the time of this work. I am also very grateful to Lorna Tilley, Alicia Shrenk and Debra Martin, who have welcomed a philosophical/critical perspective among the current chapters of this book. Finally, I thank my colleagues from the Department of Ethics and Philosophy of Lille Catholic University (France) and from the Center for the Study of Science and Philosophy of the University of Namur (Belgium), and ‘Métropole Européenne Lilloise’ which funding gave me the possibility to do this research.
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Doat, D. (2017). What Ethical Considerations Should Inform Bioarchaeology of Care Analysis?. In: Tilley, L., Schrenk, A. (eds) New Developments in the Bioarchaeology of Care. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39901-0_17
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