Aspies For Freedom

Interesting topic.

To consider culture is to consider shared symbolic communication.  Shared mechanisms for understanding and organizing experiences.  It has been said that language is the carrier of culture for just this reason.  The symbols we can readily access not only allow us to organize and understand our world, they also constrain the ways in which we are able to organize and understand our world. Goodness knows that I often have ideas/insights that I cannot articulate.  

As I've dabbled across the many threads at this forum I actually had already been considering that in the worthy quest for a cohesive autistic identity there may be a tendency to lose sight of fact that within every subgroup there is normal variance.  Curves within curves ad infinitum.

I suppose it could feel frustrating for a person who has spent life in the outlying 2% to find a group where they might be considered "normal" and then discover that they are perhaps still in the outlying 2% or the subgroup. Please remember that "normal" is a statistical fiction.  I don't know what it means to be a normal autistic any more than I know what it means to be a normal person.  Sounds like nonsense to me.  But normality and culture are different things altogether.

Culture is shared symbols, shared meanings.  I think of it like concentric circles -- a really big one is human culture, next I'd be in Western culture, then US culture, university culture and military culture sort of overlap, and on until right close in with the fewest members is familial culture.  Yes, there are shared symbols and meanings just amongst the family.  Inside jokes are a good example.  

I don't know about Autistic culture, I've only been here a couple of days.  This site is the first I've seen that posits such a thing.  It almost feels like asking whether there is such a thing as a cake while the ingredients are being mixed.  There was no such thing as Hippie culture 50 years ago and now the symbols are pretty much universal.

What is it?  What do you want it to be?

Oh, also.  I recall a couple of times as I read the above that I was struck by what might be called disdain for people who are not on the spectrum.  While this attitude may be understandable if a person feels that they have been much put upon by NTs, I don't think it is healthy or productive. It is becoming what one professes to despise.

I believe austitic culture is about how a group influences, views, and connects with the world around them; basically Ken's definitions in a short nutshell. The links were great by the way Ken. I recently was part of a college summer study of students with "disablities" of all kinds. We had one major culture plus the ethnic cultures forming a web then there were subdivisions of hearing impaired, mobility impaired, visually impaired, autistic/ocd, learning disabilities etc. We often had open ended discussions about disability culture and our subcultures. I loved how it brought different groups together, we called it our clans. I personally do not despise NTs and act as ambassador to help NTs understand people like us in my community, in fact I'm starting a diasbility networking club at my high school to united "disabled" and "nondisabled" people.
Side note: the d word is in quotations because I don't believe in it but I wanted speech that NTs would recognize.

Ken, you are BRILLIANT!

And how hard is it to weed out what actually is an Autistic thing and what isn't?  (I dislike cats and video games.  By some people's criteria, that means I'm not an Aspie.)

Sorry, no answers, just more questions.
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Well said Ethel.
                            Martin