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This course is an overview of the emerging anthropology of autism. It surveys the history of the autism diagnosis -- from its original formulation at Johns Hopkins in 1943 to its rapid expansion into a "spectrum" condition in the late 1990s -- and the ways in which social scientists of different disciplines have tried to analyze the role of social and cultural factors in its evolution. The course also looks at a range of ethnographic studies that have asked what it means be autistic in today's world.