INTELLECTUAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES VOLUME 46, NUMBER 3: 252–256 JUNE 2008 252 American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Book Review What Is Mental Retardation? Ideas for an Evolving Disability in the 21st Century (Rev.), H. N. Switzky and S. Greenspan, Editors. Washington, DC: Amer- ican Association on Mental Retardation (AAMR) (now the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities; AAIDD), 2006. DOI: 10.1352/2008.46:252–256 The day before Memorial Day 2007, I visited Mount Auburn Cemetery, the nation’s oldest gar- den cemetery. Founded in 1831 on the southwest corner of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the cemetery contains the graves of many New England mer- chants, scientists, reformers, and literary figures. I went to Mount Auburn to find the grave of Samuel Gridley Howe. Among the other notables there, I also located the grave of B. F. Skinner. At the time, I had just finished reading the book under review, What Is Mental Retardation? As I walked among the graves on that Sunday afternoon, I wondered what Howe and Skinner would think of this curious book and of the claim for evolving ideas that it makes. It is ironic that What Is Mental Retardation? and its sponsoring publisher, the AAMR, now represent an obsolete title and a superseded organization. With ‘‘intellectual and developmental disabilities,’’ an offi- cial judgment changed labels and titles. Why would an interdisciplinary association like the AAIDD con- tinue to advance a book whose anachronistic title sug- gests the book’s same fate? And why would it produce essays that criticize, and not at all defend, its 1992 and 2002 definitions—definitions that look to the new label, disabilities, rather than to its predecessor, mental retardation? Indeed, why would AAIDD pro- duce a collection of essays more interested in criticiz- ing recent definitions of what, since 2007, it identifies as intellectual and developmental disabilities than in arguing the question its title asks? The apparently anachronistic book is about def- inition, but of course definition is always about more than definition. Definition calls to mind the use of a definition for the meaning it creates about the defined. But it also provides meaning about the definers. Indeed, sometimes words, labels, and meaning tell readers of books like the one under review more about the definition makers than they do about objects that the words, labels, and mean- ing identify. Also definitions, and the words and labels that constitute definitions, bring stability to an idea, even one like mental retardation, whose very name is now lost to history. And with loss— what Peter Marris (1987) called ‘‘the conservative impulse’’—the traditionalists long for an old per- manency that verifies rooted meaning, familiar en- terprise, and constructions of self. Of course, the whiff of anachronism falls more places than one, and stability is never more longed for than in a time of change. So it would be wrong to call the book’s subtitle, Ideas for an Evolving Dis- ability in the 21st Century, disingenuous. Evolving change suggests steady, reasonable, and natural movement; ideas suggest that experts control the change. Mental retardation, the subtitle selectors im- ply, is an idea that follows change disembodied from its political, judgmental, and contextual exigencies. If there are exigencies, their effects are like the ef- fects on evolving species—measured, understand- able, and even predictable. Mental retardation, a name for which most of the book’s essayists claim no discomfort, appears as a stable idea whose meaning, if it changes at all, occurs out of their research. Their research, in many cases accumulated over shared, overlapping lifetimes, suggests the progress, ad- vancement, even the evolving of knowledge, about mental retardation. This change is, of course, always controlled. The 1992 and 2002 definitions, whose evaluations are the central theme of this volume, are, with a few exceptions, neither the products of these experts nor of their accumulated, advancing knowledge. Who are these experts, what the volume’s ed- itors call ‘‘a rare collection of leading thinkers in the MR field, representing a highly varied cross sec- tion of perspectives, world views, and suggestions for the future of the MR construct’’ (p. xxiii)? Con- trary to this hyperbolic claim, the 26 contributors’ thinking is hardly rare, and their contributions re- flect neither varied perspectives nor a future con- struct. Among them are 20 men (77%) and 6 wom- en (23%). Each of the authors comes from ethnic backgrounds most people would label White. Nine of the authors, including both of the editors, are retired and 1 is deceased (38%). Most of the re- maining contributors are, as the English say, of a certain age. Two of the authors are physicians (8%),