An Ordinary Future: Margaret Mead, the Problem of Disability, and a Child Born Different by Thomas Pearson (review)

The future to which Thomas Pearson speaks in An Ordinary Future: Margaret Mead, the Problem of Disability, and a Child Born Different (2023) belongs to his daughter Micaela. As a child with Down Syndrome, she lives in a loving, active family, attends local public schools, and has an "ordinary" life, deeply entangled, as kids frequently are, with her siblings, kin, and neighbors. Throughout the book, Pearson compares his daughter's experiences to those of Neil Erikson, the fourth offspring of the famous child psychologist, Eric Erikson, born seventy years earlier, who was institutionalized immediately, living and dying outside of his family and community. Margaret Mead, a good friend of Erikson's, counseled him to accept the doctors' advice as soon as they diagnosed the newborn, telling all family members that their son had died at birth. As Pearson puts it, "Though they share that extra chromosome, Neil Erikson and my daughter were born into very different worlds" (21). And it is the continuous comparison of those worlds as they implicate anthropology specifically, as well as public prejudice and eugenic thinking more generally, that Pearson skillfully weaves together throughout this book. At once a contribution to the history of anthropology, the anthropology of North America, questions of reflexive scholarship, and disability studies, An Ordinary Future belongs in the teaching library for both advanced undergraduate and graduate students.

In six chapters and an epilogue, Pearson weaves together his own story as Micaela's father and an anthropologist with that of Margaret Mead, analyzing the many forces that reshaped attitudes and practices around children (and adults) with intellectual/developmental disability (I/DD) over the course of the second half of the 20^th century in the U.S. and many other countries. Among those chapters, Pearson highlights the problematic nature of medico-legal diagnostic categories such as "Mongoloid," which later became glossed with the general term, "mental retardation," and more recently morphed into Intellectual/Developmental Disability (I/DD). He also traces the rise and decline of institutions to segregate and contain those living under these diagnoses in the U.S. and the role of families in mobilizing to take their members with I/DD home, fighting to secure community-based resources for them. These threads run throughout Pearson's narrative.

So, too, does the flawed legacy of anthropological theory and practice: for example, Boasian-influenced anthropologists radically interrogated evolutionary racialization in their early 20^th-century research and writing, both academic and popular, showing how various small-scale, tribal cultures, waves of immigrant communities, and ordinary mainstream (read: middle-class) Americans all had common goals as culture bearers around the world and at home. Yet "disability" was left as a naturalized category of inferiority, an uninterrogated label that was used to describe and inscribe those who could not participate fully in their home culture. An Ordinary Future explores how and why this has long been the case, situating anthropologists and the theories we embrace and promulgate as products of their historical embeddedness. If this slim, highly readable text were to make its way into histories of anthropology or social sciences courses, it would not only be a useful addition to understanding how practitioners and fields change. It would also "crip" the history of anthropology, showing how disability studies provides a theoretical lens for recentering and including those who have too-often been radically and violently excluded. In this, a disability perspective also contributes to the ongoing decolonization of our field.

Such discussions are more than academic. A widespread public and private legacy of discrimination against disabled children and adults—ableism—still looms large. Indeed, those born with Erving Goffman's famous "stigma" too often continue to elicit sorrow and shame. As a powerful and painful example, Pearson meditates on the frequent, spontaneous response to the news of his newborn daughter's diagnosis: folks ranging from medical professionals to university colleagues to first-degree [End Page 430...