The Study of Signed Languages: Essays in Honor of William C. Stokoe

Index

necessarily natural inhabitants of a place unified in space. Pan-ethnic communities such as those of Native Americans and Latinos as well as the Deaf community are examples of such fluid communities that require extensive cultural work through explicit talk and performance to remain cohesive (Sommers 1991; Weibel-Orlando 1999). Though we may not have a visible neighborhood to provide a sense of stable ground for the maintenance of Deaf culture, our stories, and our discourse carry the burden of forming the symbolic structure of our way of life. Cultural events provide a chance for this kind of cultural work, constructing “places” out of the temporary and boundaries out of words. The anxieties many of us have at present about holding communities together are valid. In increasingly complex and diverse societies, the fabric of community life appears to be fragile indeed. But, perhaps identities and communities have always been fragile. Their fragility has just been obscured by other stabilities of place and institution. When we look at how different communities, despite lack of geographical cohesion , have managed to maintain and create community, we can see the symbolic work of remembering, rebuilding, and recreating the culture through various practices. It is through cultural performances of ceremony, ritual, and festival in display events that we meet together to self-consciously and unselfconsciously reflect upon our identities and connections to the community . Within the symbolic work of such performance, social tensions can be played out and resolved temporarily. Symbols and emblems are woven in and out of the action of performances to stitch deeper meanings into the fabric of interconnectedness between peoples. Borders are hemmed in and seams mended, emotions pricked. Whether at the signed poetry performance, the coffeehouse discussion or the church service, deaf people and their hearing allies continually worry about the positioning of those symbolic boundaries and the survival of American Sign Language.The hope of their own survival into an uncertain future is symbolically and literally tied to the survival of American Sign Language . Just as Veditz and his compatriots worried about the survival of their language almost 100 years ago, in some way, our constant anxiety about the demise of sign language (and its culture) has served as the 258 Carol A. Padden and Jennifer Rayman salvation from peril. This constant anxiety and expectation of the demise of the culture, moves us forward into a constant cycle of rebuilding and preparing for the rebuilding of the culture. Acting out this anxiety in positive ways provides us with the hope that we will not let go. We close with a description of a photograph on the wall of the president’s residence at Gallaudet University. It was taken most likely in the late 1880s or early 1890s, a panoramic wide shot of the main grounds of the campus, from the President’s House to Faculty Row and includes the old Gymnasium and College Hall. A party of young men are standing, scattered around the lawn, nattily attired with walking canes and dark suits. As we look at their profiles and haughty arrangement across the lawn, we are struck by a sense of ownership that these men had of the land.The space of Gallaudet University is extraordinary indeed, 100 acres of land where deaf people have congregated since the founding of the university in 1864. Their confidence in place is palpable . But this stiffly proud collection of white men seems an anomaly, for now Gallaudet admits women and students of color. The old buildings in the photograph still exist, but interspersed among them are high-rise dormitories and modern brick structures. The pastoral campus of the waning years of the nineteenth century is gone as is segregation by race and gender. What we have to look forward to in the future is not that communities become fluid, but that as communities change and shift, they need to exist in the face of durable and stable places like Gallaudet. As communities become more fluid, the stability of places like this campus become even more significant. As we face the challenges of maintaining cultural identity in the face of technological innovation, population diversity, and migration, we need to write a new description of the community that recognizes forces of regeneration and renewal and, at the same time, recognize the need for stability of place in different forms. As we continue to describe sign languages, especially those newly created and those existing for longer times, we...