Affordances, other-than-human kin, and neurodiversity

In our household, there are people, some with ASD, and there is a very old dog. I don’t have time to work this up into a proper research paper: the sensory world of our total household is shared through constant social interactions, but no one person in our household has access to all of them. This seems to me to present something of a challenge to the way in which social anthropology, or indeed any serious social science, appropriates phenomenology; and it is also a challenge to the peculiarly North American insistence on ASD as a kind of pathological solipsism.

Specific examples will help here. ASD has among its many features both hyper- and hypo- sensory responses. When a person with ASD rocks back and forth, or puts something with a specific texture into their mouth and manipulates it with their lips and tongue at length, this is a way of deliberately stimulating a sense (in the first case, the sense of bodily awareness; in the second, the tactile sense). In some cases, children with ASD where there is reduced sensitivity across multiple senses crave sensations, and encouraging their family to provide them with a rich diet of experience is, I am told, one of the first steps toward better social interaction. By contract, when a person with ASD wears ear protectors or sunglasses, it dampens sense inputs that may overload their ability to process sense data altogether. We have oil rig helicopters fly over our house every day, and when for whatever reason they decide to fly relatively low, the ear defenders go on quickly. As with any sense experience, though, these are all social. We talk about them and respond to them, we learn from senses we don’t have and we share the sense data we can offer. A person with an exceptionally keen sense might say, for example, ‘I think the dog is stressed — she smells stressed.’ Other people can’t smell that scent, but it’s part of the household’s social awareness of the world around them and their own state. In the same way, we know to ask if a sound (the piano, the hoover) is painfully loud and make accommodations so that those with hypersensitive hearing don’t overload and melt down.

The dog, who is a very old collie-cross lurcher, is remarkably alert even though she is largely blind, completely deaf, and going a bit senile. When she works her way around the house looking for morsels to steal, which she still dutifully does, the only sense she has left that serves her well is scent. She walks right through a conversation, treading on toes, following a scent. When younger she was very careful to give no sign that she was tracking a lost bit of cheese, looking and listening for humans who might thwart her; now, all she has is scent. When we go out for a walk, her long-range senses have dulled and her sense of anxiety has increased such that she has to stay on a short lead for her own sense of safety—though I used to depend on her keen senses and constant loping to alert me to animals nearby. But when we get to her favourite place, the beach near here, she takes long minutes deeply inhaling the scents of each clump of washed-up seaweed. We walk from scent-cluster to scent-cluster: logs that other dogs mark, tangled knots of kelp, dead crabs. She is completely alert, and when we get home, she has had enough experience for a day and is happy.

Both of these examples, though they already show clearly that sense experience is social in the same moment that it is embodied, depend on prior social learning. The dog, who was a puppy, taught us what she could sense by signalling to us — an upright tail, cocked ears, hackles up — but we taught her the space in which she lives and through valuing her senses and her communication of those senses, we helped her grow up as an actively, and socially, intelligent member of our pack; and in that process she helped us become a pack with a full range of senses. As for the children, our research in Nepal on sensory practices among Baṇiyā and Tulādhar drove us to reflect on our own sensory rearing practices. Maternal milk, first rice, bananas, the strange concoctions we make for our children…then slowly introducing new textures and flavours. ‘There is no word in English for this flavour, but in Newari we call it pālu and in Spanish there’s a similar term, picante.’ ‘Do you like the way that is a little bit tangy?’ ‘I’m sorry, is that too crunchy?’ ‘Don’t eat that! You’re too young for spicy food like that.’ Every time we eat/feed together, we are constantly cueing children to discover sense perceptions and associated terminology, embodying them with culture. Many people have already written about this — but even in a family without ASD or dogs, there might be a child who (surprisingly) likes Brussels sprouts, another who can’t stand bread crusts, another who likes to chew on orange peel or Parmesan rind. Factor in the ASD and the sensory equipment of another species, and the social sensorium expands dramatically. ‘What’s the dog hearing, Mum? Is there someone outside?’ ‘Please don’t play with that polystyrene foam — it sounds really scrapy and sharp and the sound is glinty and too bright.’

I don’t have the time (on a family Saturday morning) to chase out all the theoretical implications of this, but it is at least important to see that (1) the sense affects associated with ASD are not solipsistic; (2) the idea that affordances operate at the level of individual organisms (if we can use that language in a holobiont world anyway!) rather bluntly ignores the social genesis of sense perceptions; (3) a social group negotiates/contends/shares/encultures a much broader sensorium than any one body could detect; and hence the affordances of the group, through which new individuals are enculturated into their sensibilities, exceed the capacity of a single body but create the greater capacities of socialised embodied experience.