Chelsea Shields and Dr. William C. Olsen, Anthropology
During my time as an international student at the University of Ghana and volunteering at a school for mentally handicapped children, I uncovered a large lacuna in non-western mental retardation research and decided to return the next year as BYU’s Ghana Medical Anthropology field study facilitator. I desired to document and disclose Asante beliefs behind mental retardation under the hope that such awareness would lead to more positive treatment of handicapped individuals.
Mental retardation is ubiquitous to all people—existing in every civilization independent of ecological, cosmological or historical determining agents. Despite this universal phenomena, the dichotomous treatment of mentally handicapped individuals— ranging from ritualistic killings, to saintly occupations— becomes the focus of this exploratory journey down the road of cause and effect relationships. Discovering that neither historical nor environmental determinism could account for the differential treatment of mentally handicapped individuals, a new agent needed to be uncovered.
I began my search by examining the non-medical etiologies of mental retardation amongst the Asante peoples in Ghana pertaining to why people are born mentally handicapped. I was able to find that these understandings directly establish, enforce, and determine societal treatment toward those individuals. “The concepts of human behavior that we hold determine the way we behave toward people in many different situations. Our conceptions actually constitute a social theory from which we derive our social actions towards social problems, our rules of everyday social intercourse, as well as our scientific actions in the study of human behavior.”1 This was done by asking local traditional healers, teachers and parents why they thought individuals were born mentally handicapped. I then participated both in educational settings as well as in divinations ceremonies, allowing me to better understand and accurately record the cultural context of Asante beliefs. All of the myths, stories, legends, and etiologies of mental retardation collected can be compartmentalized into two main categories of origin: parental, and religious.
Parental
Direct and indirect retribution are the two ways that the origins of mental retardation attributed to parental causation are distinguished. Direct retribution refers to infliction of the perpetrator. Indirect retribution refers to infliction of a relative or the unborn offspring of the perpetrator. There are also three main categories in which parental causation can be separated: 1) broken taboos, 2) sin, and 3) greed. 1) There are many taboos in Asante life that help to establish and enforce societal control. If these taboos are broken, punishments ensue. Parents who break food, sex, shrine, etiquette, ritual, animal, or traditional taboos can be punished with mentally handicapped offspring. 2) As a result of ritual, moral, private, or public sin, punishment comes directly or indirectly from the ancestors, or ancestral gods to the offenders. Mental retardation is said to be a sign of divine displeasure or punishment to the parent for past misconduct. 3) Greed is the third reason attributed to why parents have mentally handicapped children. It is said that when a child first appears normal at birth and then becomes mentally handicapped, one of the parents has sold the child’s soul to a fetish priest in exchange for wealth and prosperity.
Religious
Religious causation for mental retardation takes place within the realms of: 1) witchcraft, 2) cursing, 3) wicked nature, 4) divination, 5) river children, and 6) God. It is important to understand Traditional African Religion as a form of animism where there are spiritual causes for all physical manifestations, where witchcraft is legitimate and ubiquitous, and where filial ancestor piety is necessary, in order to accurately contextualize these religious categories. 1) Out of malice, envy, jealousy or revenge, a witch can curse their enemy with a handicapped child. 2) Similarly, using divinatory rituals any person can curse their enemy with a handicapped child. 3) Handicapped people are imbued with sin and conspired with evil spirits before they were born— if they were not restricted by their handicaps, they would harm all those around them. Oft times mental handicap was considered contagious. 4) A traditional healer could give a desiring barren woman a child by means of divination. This could not be a normal child, but one that was mentally handicapped. 5) Straight from the womb, some mentally handicapped children were said to be river children impregnated by the river gods. Because of this they were taken and left beside the river where they came from. 6) After all other possibilities have been exhausted, God is attributed with causing the mental handicap.
With the advent of western medicine, it is currently believed that the mother’s intake of illicit herbs, tonics, medicines, and home remedies can also cause mental retardation. It is interesting to note that in every anecdotal etiology that was negative the tenets treated the mentally handicapped negatively, and in those that adhered to positive etiological understanding, the mentally handicapped were treated with respect. This reinforces my hypothesis that non-medical etiologies of why a person is born mentally handicapped directly determine the societal treatment toward handicapped individuals. A statement of vital importance in medical anthropology in that it legitimizes social and cultural ideological agents as cause determining variables in bio-medical research.