UCLA

Autism is a complex developmental disorder affecting communication, social interaction, and behavior. There may be as many as one million people with autism in Indonesia, yet little information is available regarding the implications for affected individuals, families, and communities. My dissertation takes a sociocultural perspective in addressing how autism is recognized, interpreted, and treated in Javanese Indonesia. Based on 12 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Yogykarta and Jakarta, I document how autism is being introduced to and taken up by Javanese families, address the benefits and challenges of using autism as an interpretive framework for developmental difference, and consider the reactions to and implications for some of the interventions that have been attempted thus far.

In doing so I make a number of key observations and claims. First, Javanese reactions to individuals with autism are deeply influenced by local models of personhood and sociality as well as socio-economic status. Second, introducing the concept of autism to Javanese families and attempting to make it useful for them is a complex process, and those who would do so call upon a number of variably successful strategies including making autism visible in the popular media, re-signifying autism in order to reduce stigma, building supportive networks, translating unfamiliar concepts associated with autism into familiar idioms, and teaching parents how to recognize the signs of autism and adjust their behavior accordingly. These strategies seem to be least successful when dissonant with local values and practices. Given this, I describe and analyze a promising experimental treatment that incorporates therapeutic gamelan practice and performance, which provides benefits for individuals with autism within an inclusive social environment that is framed as a Javanese tradition.

My dissertation thus contributes to the growing cross-disciplinary scholarship on global autism by providing descriptive and qualitative data from Java, documents and analyzes the role of performance in the cultural construction of autism, and proposes a framework for identifying interventions that might simultaneously meet the needs of autistic individuals and incorporate locally-prized activities and models of healthy development.