Seeing Language in Sign: The Work of William C. Stokoe

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER 4 Because it demands large-scale paradiwn destruction . . . the emergence ofnew theories is generally preceded by aperiod of pronounced professional insecurity. THO MAS S. K U H N The Structure ofScientific Revolutions C HAP T E R F 0 U R [59 1 Bill and Ruth Stokoe had grown to like Washington, D.C. Within months oftheir arrival they became members ofthe St. Andrew's Society of Washington, where Bill played the bagpipes . They joined the society's Scottish country dance group and attended the St. Andrew's Day ball each November. Some members of the society became their lifelong friends. But the summers in Washington were another matter. The Stokoes found the heat and humidity disagreeable, especially since they both came from upstate New York where the days were cool and the evenings were, as Bill says, "downright cold sometimes - good sleeping weather."l The Stokoes welcomed the opportunity to leave Washington during the summer of 1957 so that Bill could attend the Buffalo linguistics seminar. They would enjoy staying with relatives, and Bill would be doing what he loved to do - studying and conversing with other intellectuals. Stokoe writes enthusiastically about that summer , which was, in many ways, one of the best times ofhis life. Amazingly, for six weeks I would be in the company of the two men whose description of English had become a major focus of one part ofmy 1953-54 sabbatical study. It seemed too good to be true: I'd get asubsidyfor what I was longing to do. In his first lecture, Haxie Smith defined the subject matter by looking quickly over the subjects of physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and psychology. The focus of our attention was to be culture, something none of the above investigated , and within culture, one of its ten major message systems called language. I had seldom been in the presence of a more inspiring teacher. Besides the knowledge of how to analyze and describe an exotic language, I learned that in normal human interaction the information exchanged was preponderantly in the communication systems "surrounding" language. These systems, which Smith and Trager and Birdwhistle calledparalanguage and kinesics (the one to be heard, the other seen), accounted for all but a fraction ofwhat passed back and forth in face-toface interaction. Our subject - language - was by comparison a minor channel for information. I learned also that lan- [60] SEEING LANGUAGE IN SIGN guage as a part ofculture, though a veryspecial part, is learned behavior, as is culture itself: to be human is to be a cultural animal, but to become enculturated in any particular culture demands direct experience and learning. It was all this, of course, that formed my thinking as early as 1957. Ihad learned from Smith and Trager that the system used by members of a culture to carry on all the activities of that culture is a language. I had come into a community where deafpeople communicated with one another in a rapid and apparently quite satisfying manner without any need to speak or hear: they had a culture of their own. To be sure, in defining language as culturally based, Trager had said it was a system of vocal symbols. So it is for the great majority, but as early as that summer I began to develop the argument that (a) deaf people in each other's company most of the time share a culture; (b) such a culture differs from standard American culture (or any of its variants) because ofa radical difference in physiological foundations; and (c) therefore, the system ofgestural, not vocal, symbols used by deafpeople is by definition a language. Itwas blindness to culture as a concept and inabilityto see cultural differences as anything but deficiencies that made those trained in speech and hearing, those most closely associated with deaf people, those who "educated" the deaf, unable to see what was so plain to one familiar with the anthropological thinking of Trager and Smith. In that summer institute I also learned about systems thinking. The principle was simply that it is impossible to understand a system by isolating one of the components for detailed study while ignoring that component's contribution to the working ofthe system as well as the system's effect on it. The application of this to the study of sign language was first to be careful: the study needed many signers - not just one infonnant, but...