Mythical Hope 9 - Cultural heritage or cultural baggage?

Over the course of the Hope-themed postings I’ve been putting up since late September, I have written on a few occasions about worlds – the world of non-autistic people, and the world of an autistic person. I have stressed that this is an over-simple way of dividing up autistic and non-autistic experiences. But I am also aware that it can be helpful to think in terms of an autistic ‘world’. And one thing I am seeking to do with the activities I am developing is to engage an autistic way of being, feeling, thinking, and engaging with others. 

I am driven by a view that classical myth can bring something distinctive here. But there is one thing I would like to stress in this posting. This is that I am not trying to give classical antiquity as some kind of ‘gift’ to autistic children. One view of ‘outreach’ activities is as follows: it's that outreach can open up cultural heritage to those who might otherwise be excluded from this heritage. There is a lot that can be great about such activities, but there is also a risk here that those doing the outreach are trying to bring in the ‘reached,’ less ‘privileged’ ones – and I am worried that the result might be that certain, elitist, notions of classics might be being perpetuated.

But there is another way of coming to this issue. This is the way proposed by Nicola Grove and Keith Park in their book Odyssey Now.[1] This book adapts some of the adventures of Odysseus and his companions for disabled people, especially those with profound disabilities. They stress that one reason for picking Odysseus was this: the very heritage of the Odysseus story. What they are offering is an opportunity for people who might be excluded from aspects of a shared cultural heritage to participate in stories and to encounter characters whose roots runs deep into a shared culture. And they make the case that basing their activities around the story of Odysseus, with all its cultural heritage, can open up cultural experiences to those who might otherwise lack an access to intellectual life.

There are some problems with all this. One is that the intellectual life in question is a ‘Western’ one. More than this, it is one shared by a narrow group within such a ‘Western’ civilisation.


My first gateway: Tales of the Greek Heroes:
Retold  from the ancient authors
by Roger Lancelyn Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Date given 1958, but this is presumably to a hardback edition?

Activities using classical myths can help provide ‘cultural knowledge’ to those who might not easily access such knowledge. By ‘cultural knowledge,’ I mean shared beliefs, customs and systems: what Eva Loth describes as “socially shared models or meaning systems, beliefs about the world, which influence the way we perceive, construct, think about, define, and interpret the social world and our experiences in it.”[2] Such activities can also extend people’s experiences in a way that fits what Lev Vygotsky said in his study of cultural-historical psychology about human learning. This was that such learning “presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them.” [3] Could classical myth do this? Could it help autistic children become part of a wider intellectual life?



Maybe – but I want to come at things from yet another angle. This is the angle of a child discovering classical myth. I’m meaning a specific child – myself, aged about ten. This was a very personal discovery. There wasn’t any classical myth told by, or known by, those around me. My experience of discovering classical myth would have been different if I had experienced classical myth at home or school. Rather, I was given a book retelling stories from classical myth by my grandfather, who didn’t himself know any of the stories. And reading it opened up a world that fascinated me – but in part because it fuelled my sense of being different. If it helped me, it was because it gave a kind of refuge.

So… to draw this posting to a close, I would like to stress that I can see benefits in giving people access to a shared cultural heritage – to stories of such heroes as Hercules, who has been part of culture – ‘high’ and ‘low’- at various points since antiquity. But I am not only seeking a way for autistic children to ‘grow into’ the intellectual life around them. I am also looking for a way to stimulate or engage children’s own inner lives.

In a future posting, I plan to say more about the use Grove and Park make of Odysseus and to discuss how their approach to Odysseus might have some Herculean applications.

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[1] Nicola Grove and Keith Park, Odyssey Now, London: Jessica Kingsley, 1996.

[2] Eva Loth, “Abnormalities in “cultural knowledge” in Autism Spectrum Disorders: a link between behaviour and cognition,” in Evelyn McGregor et al., ed. Autism: An Integrated View from Neurocognitive, Clinical, and Intervention Research, Malden MA etc.: Blackwell) 85.

[3] Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978 (published posthumously), 89.