Comment on Turner

COMMENT ON TURNER by Leila F. Monaghan All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency , a party, a particular work, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which ithas lived its socially charged life-all words and forms are populated by intentions. (Bakhtin [1934-35] 1981:293) In response to Graham Turner's comments on Deaf culture, I would like to explore some of the implications of the words "Deaf culture;" i.e. the "tastes" of professions and contexts he has invoked: Carol Padden's definitions of Deaf culture and community and what Turner suggests in their place, and Brian Street's notion of "culture as a verb" and its correlate, "hegemony " [i.e. domination of a group]. The tastes of these notions can be best explored by looking at their consequences, at what happens when they are used. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz points out, "Operationalism ... [had] an important point to make ... if you want to understand what a science is ... you should look at what the practitioners of it do" (1973:6). Thus I shall operationalize this comment by comparing three works: Padden and Humphries' Deaf in America: Voices from a culture (1988); Brian Street's Cross CulturalApproaches to Literacy (1993); and Jean and John Comaroff's Of Revelation andRevolution (1991), which makes good use of Gramsci's notion of hegemony. I shall then discuss the implications of some of the differences among these works. Padden's ([1980:92] 1989:4) description of culture as a "set of learned behaviors of a group of people who have their own language , values, rules for behavior, and tradition," fits the presentation by Padden and Humphries of a brief history of the US Deaf community and the relation of their own experiences as well as stories collected from interviews, films, and written sources and some analysis of language forms, such as handshapes, that are used in puns and poetry. They strive to capture qualitatively a life of deaf people outside that typically seen by academics. One of the greatest strengths of their book is that it provides a particularly striking contrast to works based in medical and audiological views of deafness (e.g. Rodda 1970 and Frisina 1976) in @1994 Linstok Press, Inc. Note inside front cover ISSN 0302-1475 139 Monaghan which claims of social scientific authority and methodology are used to deny the historical and cultural reality ofthe lives ofDeaf people. All these works based on deafness as pathology remained unchallenged in academic circles until the rise of Deaf linguistics and sociolinguistics and more general Deaf studies, in which Padden and Humphries are leaders. The importance of these new fields on their work is clear: 79 of 86 references (in Padden & Humphries 1988) are from sign language linguistics or Deaf studies. Five are from non-sign linguistics; one is from psychology and one from anthropology (the ubiquitous Clifford Geertz). But many anthropologists, particularly Brian Street, deal with power differentials similar to that between Deaf people and the hearing authorities who try to control their lives. A major theme of Street's work is how literacy can be a mechanism for "social control and [part of] the hegemony of a ruling class" 1993:2f). In his 1993 volume, he brings together works he considers "a state-of-the-art sample of the most promising research " (ibid.). The studies collected are for the most part from the disciplines of sociocultural anthropology and sociolinguistics influenced by discourse analysis. All are based on long-term contact (one year to decades) between a researcher and the group being studied, but the researchers are not members of the group; most continue the traditional anthropological practice of "studying down"-ironically the book is about people who make a living by being literate studying how literacy is used in cultures where literacy is not so pervasive. The methods used are anthropological and sociolinguistic: particular villages, towns, or individuals are studied and put into historical and political contexts. Certain aspects of these communities or people are then highlighted with data from observation, interviews, surveys, and close analysis of talk. Works in literacy studies, anthropology...