This study explores the self-meaning and experiences of people with oligodactyly (fewer than five fingers or toes) in the village of Ulutaue, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. The research uses a subjective interpretive method and a health communication approach to understand how these individuals construct their identity and interact with their surrounding environment despite their physical abnormalities. The findings reveal that people with oligodactyly associate their condition with both positive and negative self-meanings, including feelings of shame, worthiness of pity, a drive to work hard, patience, and encouragement. Their physical differences are often perceived by others as “scary, goose-bumpy, pitiful, and disgusting,” leading to stigma and isolation. However, the study emphasizes the need to view these individuals as subjects with their own subjective experiences, rather than just as objects of their physical condition.

1.  People with oligodactyly in the village of Ulutaue, Indonesia construct their self-meaning and identity in relation to their physical abnormalities.

2.  They associate their condition with both positive and negative self-perceptions, including feelings of shame, worthiness of pity, a drive to work hard, patience, and encouragement.

3.  Others often perceive their physical differences as "scary, goose-bumpy, pitiful, and disgusting," leading to stigma and isolation.

4.  The study emphasizes the need to view people with oligodactyly as subjects with their own subjective experiences, rather than just as objects of their physical condition.

5.  The research uses a subjective interpretive method and a health communication approach to understand the lived experiences of this population.

The people with oligodactyly construct themselves with self-meaning that has physical abnormalities and different forms of physical organs from others. They give a certain meaning to what is experienced based on communication experiences in social inter- actions in their daily lives that have shaped the social world that they believe and developed into reality in social life. Some people with oligodactyly viewed their defected body just as a different body, while others considered their deformed hands and feet as God’s curse, and still others regarded their ailments as God’s bounty.

Some findings explain that people with oligodactyly have self-meaning physical abnormalities and physical form limitations. People with oligodactyly are treated differently from others in the surrounding environment, although most of them show the same tendency to avoid others from communicating in social interactions in the surrounding environment, such as self-despair and closed self are negative self- meaning discouraging to survive. The treatment of acceptance of discrimination raises social anxiety and communication barriers. This research found positive messages that tend to be accepted and internalized, such as resigned self, self-spirit and optimistic self as positive self-meaning with self-confidence, no distinction, life as it is, not burdened and not thinking about physical abnormalities experienced.

Then the shape of the owned physical organ is different from other people in the surrounding environment, some of them still regret their fate, and others interpret it as a gift from God behind the physical deformity and the shape of the physical organ experienced. As a human being wants to have a perfect physical and not as individual physical limitations but does not try to seek treatment, he feels ashamed to be insulted, ridiculed, and ridiculed as receiving treatment in the surrounding environment.

In this research the social construction theory and the theory of symbolic interaction has been useful in exploring the experiences of the people with oligodactyly. To some degree, the way the people with oligodactyly have defined their physical condition and the way they looked at themselves have been molded by the way others have treated them, although some of the people with oligodactyly have redefined their illness and their self-meaning in a more creative way, especially those who have considered their illness as God’s bounty.

This research has discussed several aspects of the life experience of people with oligodactyly communicating with the surrounding environment. It has been found, for example, that they receive the nickname “finger stalked, crab finger man, and or crab hand family” that can weaken the oligodactyly. Further research needs to be carried out to investigate other aspects, one of which is how to explore forms of communication behaviors with oligodactyly with fellow oligodactyly, families, communities, governments and television media. From a methodological perspective, it is hoped that this research can be continued with the same research methods and approaches, such as phenomenological methods and qualitative approaches to study the communication behavior of the people with oligodactyly. Indeed, this topic is beyond our current discussion.

A qualitative approach can be a method for understanding and knowing the communication psychology with oligodactyly. Through this research, it is hoped that related parties, especially the Ministry of Social Affairs, Ministry of Education and Sports support and socialize about the people with oligodactyly so that there is no more stigmatization as an act of discrimination and labeling for them. Socialization can be done in the form of seminars on disabilities so that the public knows that people with oligodactyly are not a contagious disease but rather a physical disorder in the fingers and toes.