ABSTRACT
Ethnography offers unique barriers and opportunities to disabled anthropologists and sociologists. This chapter draws upon the disability career literature and on what disabled anthropologists and sociologists have disclosed in order to explore how the lived experience of impairments and disability affect careers and what disabled anthropologists and sociologists with and through their bodies have to contribute to the literature. Reflexive ethnography is considered to be a specific form of anthropology ‘at home’ in that the main focus is on the ethnographers’ own experiences. Disabled professionals who are gainfully employed have supposedly ‘overcome’ or ‘conquered’ their impairments; at best they may have jobs but not careers. Colligan’s body was subject to a close reading by Karaite informants that assisted her by specific activities of daily living in the context of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur in Israel and had, as such, privileged access to an intimate knowledge of her body.
