You can't handle being around people? Well, we still got cows that need milking, and corn that needs planting. You're not up to physical labor and believe you're being badgered by demons half the time? Well, you still manage to keep it together enough to teach school, and this is before we had a strict school schedule.
This definitely fits with what we've read about how autistic people got along before universal schooling and demands to make them "indistinguishable from their peers." If you could lean to milk cows, harvest crops, cut wood, etc, there was a place for you. The crops/milk/wood were far more valuable, in terms of the family's survival, than the person who produced them being able to act "normal" at all times. Even well into the 20th century, institutionalization was only for those who could afford to ship their children off to institutions for years on end. In our father's mostly working-class family, there were a LOT of neurodiverse people, including at least one who went through a long nonverbal phase, that the family found ways to accomodate because they didn't have the money to send them away and pretend they didn't exist. All of them eventually went on to live independent lives, or independent lives supported by relatives or close friends/roommates.
There were probably a lot more people with various health problems around, and the idea of doing things to help them out may have been more of an ingrained social norm.
Yeah, I feel like this is something that's been lost in larger US culture. When you had no hospitals, no specialized caretakers, and everyone was used to dealing with chamberpots anyway, cleaning someone who was too ill to leave their bed for months on end was just something you did, because there was no one else to do it for you. I mean, I'm not suggesting going back to that specific way of life, but... Well, it's always struck us how in a lot of non-Western rural cultures, modern Western anthropologists tend to be amazed at families actually loving and caring for severely disabled people, as if the only reaction they expected was for them to be thrown off a cliff or something. I mean, we've met people who are amazed when we mention evidence that prehistoric people cared for their elderly and disabled, because of this modern notion that "primitive people" only care for the "survival of the fittest."
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Date: 2020-03-06 09:47 pm (UTC)This definitely fits with what we've read about how autistic people got along before universal schooling and demands to make them "indistinguishable from their peers." If you could lean to milk cows, harvest crops, cut wood, etc, there was a place for you. The crops/milk/wood were far more valuable, in terms of the family's survival, than the person who produced them being able to act "normal" at all times. Even well into the 20th century, institutionalization was only for those who could afford to ship their children off to institutions for years on end. In our father's mostly working-class family, there were a LOT of neurodiverse people, including at least one who went through a long nonverbal phase, that the family found ways to accomodate because they didn't have the money to send them away and pretend they didn't exist. All of them eventually went on to live independent lives, or independent lives supported by relatives or close friends/roommates.
There were probably a lot more people with various health problems around, and the idea of doing things to help them out may have been more of an ingrained social norm.
Yeah, I feel like this is something that's been lost in larger US culture. When you had no hospitals, no specialized caretakers, and everyone was used to dealing with chamberpots anyway, cleaning someone who was too ill to leave their bed for months on end was just something you did, because there was no one else to do it for you. I mean, I'm not suggesting going back to that specific way of life, but... Well, it's always struck us how in a lot of non-Western rural cultures, modern Western anthropologists tend to be amazed at families actually loving and caring for severely disabled people, as if the only reaction they expected was for them to be thrown off a cliff or something. I mean, we've met people who are amazed when we mention evidence that prehistoric people cared for their elderly and disabled, because of this modern notion that "primitive people" only care for the "survival of the fittest."
-Amaranth and Istevia