"The Mantle of Competence"Robert B. Edgerton is an anthropologist interested in psychological and medical anthropology. His early work focused on individual adaptation to different ecological conditions, on the one hand, and on mental retardation, on the other. His interests 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 to studies on deviant behavior (Alone Together) and on 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 priority this 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 maintained a interest in the community adaptation of people. with slight mental retardation. For the past 40 years, Edgerton also served as a teacher and mentor at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, where he received extensive support for his research. Robert Edgerton began studying mental disability in the late 1960s. Edgerton was interested in discovering how deinstitutionalized intellectually disabled adults adapted to life in the community and how they coped with the stigma of being labeled as mentally retarded . He argued that they used a "cloak of competence" to hide both the stigma of their discredited past and their inherent incompetence. Rather than taking the issue of the incompetence of mentally disabled people as unproblematic and taken for granted, Edgerton in his book has, in a different way, challenged the social and cultural assumptions that exist in notions of competence. . He also argues that the concept of incompetence automatically takes notions of competence as given and seeks to situate cultural interpretations of incompetence within this broader framework. In doing so, the book contributes both to debates about labeling and competence and to cross-cultural studies of intellectual disability. While recognizing the various 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 the analysis of social and cultural identity, personality and individuality.