"The Cloak of Competence" Robert B. Edgerton is an anthropologist with interests in psychological and medical anthropology. His early works focused on the one hand on individual adaptation to different ecological conditions and on the other on mental retardation. His interest in mental retardation led to books such as The Cloak of Competence, which will be analyzed in this article, and Lives in Process. His ecological interests produced The Individual in Cultural Adaptation, followed by Rules, Exceptions, and Social Order. He then turned his attention to studies on deviant behavior (Alone Together) and mental illness (Changing Perspectives in Mental Illness with S. Plog). In recent years he has developed an interest in how people cope with the stress of war, a focus which has led to several books (Like Lions They Fought, Mau Mau, The End of the Asante Empire, Warriors of the Rising Sun, Death or Glory and Warrior Women and Hidden Heroism). This interest continues, as does his concern with the impact of cultural relativism on cultural theory, best seen in Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony, published in 1992. Throughout his career, he has maintained an interest in community adaptation of people. with mild mental retardation. For the past 40 years, Edgerton has also been a teacher and mentor at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, where he has received much support for his research. Robert Edgerton began studying mental disability in the late 1960s. Edgerton was interested in finding out how deinstitutionalized adults with intellectual disabilities adapted to life in the community and how they coped with the stigma of being labeled mentally retarded. He argued that they used a “cloak of competence” to hide both the stigma of their discredited past and their inherent incompetence. way, it questioned the social and cultural assumptions that exist within the concept of competence. He further argues that the concept of incompetence automatically takes the notion of competence as fact and seeks to situate cultural interpretations of incompetence within this broader framework. In this way the book contributes both to debates about labeling and competence and to cross-cultural studies of intellectual disability. While acknowledging the diverse influences of capitalism, colonialism, urbanization, and industrialization on perceptions and constructions of intellectual disability, this book also adds a new and significant dimension by including analysis of social and cultural notions of identity, personhood, and individuality.