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Uncertain passage: Care and disability in contemporary Jordan
Abstract
Government ministries, civil society organizations, transnational partnerships, and social media savvy disability communities are bringing cognitive disability into public focus across Jordan. This public shift coincides with significant demographic transitions, including rising life expectancy, decreasing fertility, and changing marriage patterns, all of which impact local kinship-based economies of care (Ababsa 2013; Hasso 2011; Singerman 2011). The implications for individuals who possess non-normative bodies and minds are complex, as new opportunities continue to expand alongside eroding social safety nets and increasingly grim economic indicators. Pursuing a disability-centered anthropology, this paper broadly attests to the relevance of emerging biosocial identities in Jordanian social life and politics. At the same time, it demonstrates how these identities continue to unfold and make sense in relation to enduring concerns of family, care, and faith. During my research on disability and kinship in Amman, mothers of children with Down Syndrome struggled with uncertainties raised by the passage of time. One woman recounted a conversation in which her teenage daughter expressed excitement at the prospect of starting her own family. While she did not consider her daughter a child, she nevertheless could not imagine her realizing the adult life that would be available to and expected of a young woman without Down Syndrome. In this paper I use ethnographic data to explore how family members engaged young people with Down Syndrome as they aged beyond childhood and into uncertain futures. For mothers of adolescents, thinking about children’s futures raised questions about what precisely adulthood entailed and for whom. Drawing on Alison Kafer's “political-relational” model of disability (2013, 6), I focus on the ways that mothers deployed concepts of accountability and obligation to position cognitively disabled children in a liminal space of extended adolescence. Negotiating the boundaries between adolescence and adulthood, their preoccupations reveal how norms of gender, sexuality, and kinship filtered both meanings and experiences of cognitive disability in Jordan. Ultimately, I argue that disability ethnography in the Middle East can contribute to a broader anthropology of personhood by tracing how cognitively disabled people participate in care networks and gain differential access to various roles within those relationships.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Jordan
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries