The Space Between: A Biocultural Ethnography of Autism

Abstract

This thesis examines autism as a biocultural phenomenon shaped by both neurobiological realities and the structural and cultural environments in which they unfold. Drawing on eight months of comparative ethnographic fieldwork across the United States, Armenia, and South Korea, and on interviews with clinicians, therapists, and educators working in autism care, I argue that dominant frameworks of disability scholarship—namely the biomedical and social models—inadequately account for the lived realities of autistic individuals across divergent national contexts. In their place, I propose the biocultural model of disability, which holds neurological difference, cultural variation, and structural context together as mutually constitutive. Through an ethnographic analysis of diagnostic infrastructure, cultural logics of inclusion and homogeneity, kinship arrangements, and the gap between policy and implementation, I demonstrate how the same neurological profiles yield vastly different developmental trajectories depending on the environment into which they are received. The biocultural model renders these differences legible as structural conditions, and therefore as conditions that can be changed. Keywords: autism; disability anthropology; biocultural model; Armenia; South Korea