Book The Body Silent by Robert Murphy - Essay Example

Throughout his book, he embarks on research among the disabled. The question remains is this truly participant observations Can you distinguish an emic and an etic point of view in the narrative Murphy writes both as an anthropologist and as a quadriplegic: "the kind of culture the handicapped American must face is just as much a part of the environs of his disability as his wheelchair. It hardly needs saying the disabled, individually and as a group, contravene all the values of youth, virility, activity, and physical beauty that American's cherish, however little most individuals may realize them.

Most handicapped people sense that others resent them for this reason: "We are subverters of the American ideal, just as the poor are betrayers of the American dream. And to the extent that we depart from the ideal, we become ugly and repulsive to the able-bodied" (Perring 2002) Disabled persons account for seeable memories that those with "normal bodies" of society are part of the disabled suffering world, they reside in a non-existent paradise and they too can be stricken at any given time.

Murphy writes: The violinist Itzhak Perlman, who suffers from the aftereffects of polio, says that when he is pushed up to an airline counter in a wheelchair, the clerk commonly asks his attendant, "Where is he going" Murphy was a professor of anthropology at Columbia University when he became progressively paralyzed by an inoperable spinal cord tumor. Throughout his book, he provides accounts of his personal experience and case studies of others in society who are dealing with disabilities everyday.

"Disability is defined by society and given meaning by culture; it is a social malady" (Murphy 1987, 4). As he writes The Body Silent he is virtually quadriplegic, hitting the keys of his computer with the eraser end of a pencil held in place by a 'universal cuff' wrapped around his palm. He is still traveling to Columbia to teach his classes. Murphy applies the metaphor of an anthropological field trip to his experience: "This book was conceived in the realization that my long illness with a disease of the spinal cord has been a kind of extended anthropological field trip, for through it I have sojourned in a social world no less strange to me at first than those of the Amazon forests.

And since it is the duty of all anthropologists to report on their travels . . . this is my accounting" (ix). Drawing not only on his own experience but also on research for which he received funding, Murphy instructs his audience in the metaphysics of his situation, and in the social as well as physical challenges of disability.Murphy took on his physical deterioration with eyes-open determination, a refusal to accept social limitations, and reliance on the essence of his selfhood--his mind.

His account is a highly informative study of the physical negotiation of paraplegia and quadriplegia, and of attitudes and assumptions harbored toward those who are physically "other." Murphy became a pioneer for rights of the handicapped and spearheaded the initiative at Columbia to provide wheelchair access and other aids. Peter Graham (1997) classified Murphy's narrative classification of "metapathography." According to Graham, metapathographies are "not