*Originally published as an invited peer commentary on Vikram Jaswal and Nameera Akhtar, Being Versus Appearing Socially Uninterested: Challenging Assumptions about Social Motivation in Autism, *Brain and Behavior Sciences 42 (e110): https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X18002443
“There’s a point where you say to hell with it, it’s impossible to please you people” (Robledo et al. 2012, p. 6 in Jaswal and Aktar 2018, p. 50). This is one of the autistic voices that Vikram K. Jaswal and Nameera Aktar amplify in this remarkable essay. They take aim at their own colleagues in developmental psychology, who have hit upon a parsimonious explanation for the atypical things autistic people do. Gaze aversion, stereotypy, and echolalia are stem from a lack of “social motivation.” Autistics don’t want to connect with others. Their strange behavior makes this clear.
Jaswal and Aktar present a lucid, compelling critique of this view. But it is not just their argument I find compelling, but also their modesty. We’re used to research articles that make strong claims: most are built of confident assertions conveying what recent research shows to be true about a phenomenon. This essay runs in the opposite direction. Jaswal and Aktar’s goal is not to build confidence, but to erode it: to show what we could gain by calling into question findings that others have presented as fact. What if it weren’t the autistics who were suffering from a deficit, but rather “you people”? How might our approach to the study of autism change?
Speaking as an anthropologist, I found three features of Jaswal and Aktar’s argument particularly striking. The first turns on comparisons between autistics and so-called “normal” people. Jaswal and Aktar insist that autistics are more similar to non-autistics than the researchers they critique have admitted. Autistics are similar in their desires, but different in their methods. Rather than describing a deficit in motivation, we could speak of a surfeit of behaviors: autistic people use a broader array of strategies in their effort to connect. What is at stake here is not the difference between populations but the disciplinary force of the norm (see Hacking 1990, Warner 1999). We anthropologists call this force normativity, and it works by setting up an impossible standard. As the disability studies scholar Rosemary Garland Thompson has argued, in the 19th century, the ideal American was male, white, employed, married, and athletic, with a full head of hair (see Thompson 1997; see also Davis 1995). But no one was truly “normal,” even if some were what Garland Thompson calls “normates,” people who lived in fear of standing out. Would-be normal people dealt with this fear by projecting their problems onto others, especially the disabled, whose appearance in public both threatened and reassured. Jaswal and Aktar’s intervention provides heft to this insight, at the same time it raises questions: could the tendency to overlook the social motivation of autistics reflect the fact that no one engages with others in completely “normal” ways?
The second feature involves their deployment of an emic perspective – one that foregrounds what autistic people think is going on. We anthropologists have long been convinced of the value of taking seriously what the people we are studying have to say. But we are not just interested in how others describe their worlds. We are also interested in why. The self-reporting problem is not a problem for us; it is an opportunity. How, when, and to whom have autistics described their lives in the terms Jaswal and Aktar bring to light? There is a wealth of ethnographies on “biosociality,” the process through which medicalized conditions have given rise to communities that engage in struggles for recognition and rights (see Dumit 2004; see also Rose and Novas 2004; see also Hacking 2009). For many anthropologists, autism is no longer a pathology; it is simply one among an array of ways of being in the world (see Grinker 2008). There are all sorts of things to say about the historical moment that has made possible the kind of testimony Jaswal and Aktar draw on, but one thing is clear: if anything reflects “social motivation,” it is the very existence of this effort on the part of autistics to describe their experiences to others. To testify is to address an imagined audience – to share one’s world is to meet outsiders to it half way. Skepticism about the limits of self-reporting seems misplaced in this instance. Some autistics speak of their longing for closeness. Some say they want to be left alone. But the very fact that they are relating these experiences reflects a desire to be socially engaged.
The third key feature of Jaswal and Aktar’s intervention is perhaps the most important. Social motivation is social, they insist: it exists in the space between persons. For most anthropologists, nothing is truly individual; our species would not be our species, in mind or body, in the absence of the social worlds we create and in which we are immersed. As Jaswal and Aktar point out, caregivers tend to impute intentionality to non-autistic infants, even when the meaning of their behavior is opaque. Whatever fuels behavior, motivation becomes social when others interpret a gesture as a bid for connection. Jaswal and Aktar call for interventions directed at caregivers, who must learn to look for all the subtle ways autistic people may be trying to engage with them. Caregivers who take on this challenge have learn to live with uncertainty, creating relationships with others whose intentions they cannot fully grasp.
Of course, it’s not just autistics whose motives are opaque. We “normal people” arguably only ever know what we ourselves are up to when we consider how our actions appear through others’ eyes (see Keane 2015). There are more or less good ways of living with this dilemma, which Jaswal and Aktar make clear – for researchers and for all of us who inhabit social worlds. Jaswal and Aktar clear the ground for a new approach to research on autism. It will be less self-assured, but far more convincing: modest in the best possible way. And, who knows? We might all get lucky. “You people” might learn how to look in the mirror.
References
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