Histories of the Normal and the Abnormal Social and Cultural Histories of Norms and Normativity

Each culture and historic period has its specific ways of defining what we would nowadays refer to as the 'normal'. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the term 'normal' was defined in English dictionaries simply in a formalistic way as 'standing at right angles', while the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Academie francaise of 1694 does not even carry a definition for 'normal'. Where we now would use the term 'normal', pre-modern definitions referred to the 'natural'. The change from a religiously ordained natural order to a scientifically grounded secular framework and the emergence of the normal/abnormal dichotomy in preference to the earlier polarisation of natural/unnatural, encapsulates an important shift, with the emergence of modern science bringing issues of norms and normativity into sharp focus. The essays in this collection engage with the concepts of the normal and the abnormal from a variety of different academic disciplines including the history of art, the social history of medicine and cultural anthropology. The internationally respected contributors use as their conceptual anchors the works of moral and political philosophers (Foucault, Canguilhem and Hacking), sociologists (Durkheim, Goffman and Illich) and anthropologists (Benedict, Douglas and Mead). Major themes covered include the way norms are constructed and reinforced; how the abnormal is streamlined or excluded; how the abnormal serves to reassert norms and normality; and the representations of the abnormal as spectacle and wonder.