An Anthropological Journey to the Field of Disability: Teaching and Research by a Disabled Anthropologist in Greece

Abstract

This article will discuss the relationship between anthropology and disability based on my fieldwork at a high school catering to special educational needs in Greece. More specifically, it will present the negotiating terms of the disabled anthropologist/teacher, who is conducting fieldwork inside and around the school area, as an example of autobiographical ethnography. I will explain the kind of perception and the degree of the identity that is the disabled person both as teacher and ethnographic researcher. These are two fields that ‘bother’ the disabled anthropologist/teacher and at the same time they create the condition for self-reflexivity on the nature of anthropology as well as teaching. Incidents that illustrate tensions, arguments, and collaboration with the informants (colleagues, students, parents, education officials, academics) during the participant observation, set up the template for the anthropological undertaking as well as the teaching procedure. This article also critically presents the events following the fieldwork when the anthropologist moves workplace by leaving the high school catering to special educational needs, where he taught and conducted the fieldwork, to teach at a general high school. This transition provides us with additional ethnographic data regarding the relationship between special education and general education by considering how students at the general high school then reacted to my fieldwork when I shared it as part of my social science teaching. This journey illustrates and explains why disability exists at the limit of the intersubjective experience inside the Greek educational system.