Robert Murphy's The Body Silent

He asserted that every change of place, state, social structure, social position is a ‘rite of passage’. He further went on saying that the energy found in any social system needs to be renewed at crucial intervals and this renewal is accomplished in different social settings through rites of passage. These rites protect and free the social system from undue disturbance in order to foster change at both individual as well as collective level. In the first phase i.e. separation, the individual detaches from a prior social state. The term separation connotes that there is something from which the individual is separating either from outside of him or something that defines ‘who he is’. The second phase is the state of liminality (betwixt and …show more content…
He further asserted that the concept of deviance and stigma did not accurately describe the social relationships between the disabled and the non-disabled people. Murphy brings out that disabled people have often been isolated, made invisible, avoided, and sometimes deprived of status. These responses are reminisces of the past which initiates that who will undergo the luminal phase of many rites of passage. He further argues that “‘disability is not a thing’, it is a juncture within a process, an assortment in the life history that is dramatized in a rite of passage frozen in its luminal stage …show more content…
In their study they describe the reasons for the overall positive acceptance of albinos in Hopi society. But this acceptance is restricted to marriage. The Hopi culture does not allow albino men to work in the fields in the order to sustain their families. Their interview with many Hopi’s revealed that albino women socially withdrew themselves but in the case of albino men, although they were rejected as marriage partners yet this rejection did not extend to sexual activity. Since albino men were not allowed to work in the fields they remained in the village with the non albino women. This gave albino men ample time and opportunities to develop sexually intimate relations with the non albino women which gave them advantage over non albino men. Wolf and Dukepoo were partially successful in demonstrating that physical difference can sometimes reap benefits in establishing sexual relationships but they grossly failed to examine the experience and meanings of sexual intimacy for people with albinism in Hopi. Further, they could not examine the specific socio-cultural beliefs and gender relations that led to the withdrawal of albino women from sexual and marriage