The topic of disability in public debate is essentially addressed from a medical-healthcare and legal perspective. Common sense, however, generally conflates the topic with the former, giving rise to prejudices that often require the most impeccable anthropology to eradicate. Disability, more than a situation or a status, is a term, invested with diverse meanings that have shaped its development and understanding over the decades. Observed, deconstructed, and then assailed by torrents of rhetoric, disability has often emerged on the fringes of academic debate and common sense as a solid and unshakeable object of study, interpreted through often Manichean lenses rather than as a socially determined phenomenon, shaped by various factors and whose conceptual framework is variably composed.
Analyzing disability
The book "The symbolic debt" (ed. Carocci) by Matthew Schianchi, a researcher at the University of Milan Bicocca and author of several texts on the topic, offers a starting point for examining the multifaceted and dispersive nature of disability, understood as a phenomenon covered by layers that are too often reduced, in academic terms, to the status of a single and unequivocal interpretation. The title is inspired by the concept of "symbolic violence"of Pierre Bourdieu, which means the so-called "normality" as a socially naturalized construction. The work analyzes sociologicamente disability, contextualizing it in a historical period, the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Different forms of cultural production are explored: literary works, novels, fairy tales with a "popular" orientation, definable as literature of manners. He also analyses the instrument of individual biography in two figures that serve as archetypes, a synthesis of that period, a useful personification of the theme: the minister Benedetto Cairoli and the poet Gian Pietro Lucini.
Body and disability
Within the research, disability clashes with the terminology present in the stories narrated by various sources of the time (including newspapers and institutional records), which have their own precise semantics, intersecting with the notion of the sick, the perception of the physical, pre -literate self-help literature , pietism, and the chronicles of the Corriere della Sera , attempting to express a coherent interpretation. The phenomenon of disability is, by extension, diverted to that which makes it manifest: the body . A body that becomes the object of reflections, statistics, life and work stories. However, there are various mechanisms that address the phenomenon (forgive the Foucaultian quote, but it is a must here), such as that relating to the pastoral dimension and the prescriptions derived from religious and theological literature. This book offers a starting point for reflecting on disability from a perspective that transcends the hagiographic and superheroic representations inherent in narratives that depict people with disabilities as subject to paranormal heroism. Instead, it situates it within the context of historical and, more generally, cultural processes, which in turn offer useful reflections for translating civic and political awareness into perspectives for change.
Stefano Sacchetti
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