IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v24y1987i3p209-217.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

'The stumbling disease': A case study of stigma among Azorean-Portuguese

Author

Listed:
  • Boutté, Marie I.

Abstract

There exists among Azorean-Portuguese a biological malady that is inherited. First recognized by biomedicine in 1972 as a distinct disease entity, it has been in existence in the United States and the Azores Islands since at least the mid-1800s. The malady is generally known as the 'stumbling disease' among the Azorean-Portuguese; the current biomedical literature refer to it as Machado-Joseph disease. Historically an aura of stigma has surrounded affected individuals, their families, and primary ethnic group in which the malady is currently found. Drawing heavily on the work of Erving Goffman (Ref. [3]: Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963) and labelling theory, this paper explores the nature of this stigma. The cultural contexts of a small, face-to-face, homogenous island setting is contrasted with that of the heterogeneous, anonymous setting of the United States to illuminate various aspects of the stigma configuration. The cultural context has important implications for stigma definitions, modes of social control, and management strategies of the stigmatized.

Suggested Citation

  • Boutté, Marie I., 1987. "'The stumbling disease': A case study of stigma among Azorean-Portuguese," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 24(3), pages 209-217, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:24:y:1987:i:3:p:209-217
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(87)90048-7
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Shala Ghaderi Berntsson & Anne-Marie Landtblom & Gullvi Flensner, 2017. "Cerebellar ataxia and intrathecal baclofen therapy: Focus on patients´ experiences," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(6), pages 1-15, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:24:y:1987:i:3:p:209-217. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.