An SLS Print Symposium

AN SLS PRINT SYMPOSIUM: In this issue Graham Turner raises the interesting question of what exactly lies behind the terms "Deaf culture" and "Deaf community " as these are used by in various intellectual disciplines and by holders of different ideologies. His question immediately suggested to the editor a print symposium of the kind pioneered by CurrentAnthropology. Comments received from those who were sent the paper are presented after the paper; Turner's reply to the comments follows. Sign Language Studies has always had a scope larger than its title implies. When Thomas A. Sebeok proposed in 1970 that I begin to edit a journal so named-one that he would produce at his Center for Semiotic Studies-I was well aware that his field was broad; languages are but a part of semiotics. He was aware in turn that I envisioned the scope of the new journal would view language studies as understood by his colleagues, my mentors, the late Henry Lee Smith, Jr. and George L. Trager. Noted for their contributions to knowledge, they were in the 1950s in the University of Buffalo's Department of Anthropology-not Linguistics , because they insisted that languages could profitably be studied only in relation to total systems they called "cultures" and that real study of languages is impossible without close attention to the people who use them and what they use them to talk about. From its beginning, SLS has never focused on sign languages alone; here no doubt it reaches even further. The universe of this discourse has changed in recent years, and attitudes toward signed languages have changed as wellperhaps more than they had changed in many centuries. In earlier periods most Europeans and Americans were oblivious to moral and intellectual difficulty when they were exploiting, even killing or enslaving, possessors of other cultures-for the sake of religion or commerce or progress. But by the middle ofthe last century , some thoughtful persons had begun looking at the peoples they exterminated, conquered, or colonized as possessing interesting , not just alien, ways of life and languages-including sign languages. The work of Garrick Mallery, "The Sign Language of among North American Indians," is a case in point. More widely influential was the later work of Franz Boas and his students. @1994 Linstok Press, Inc. Note inside front cover ISSN 0302-1475 Aprint symposium Culture shock, or difference-at one time interpreted as reaction to what was considered subhuman status or depravity-began to be re-interpreted as cultural relativism, and anthropologists found a limited number of patterns appearing in every human society, but they found as well that these patterns may be elaborated in nearly infinite ways. The shrinking of the world and the movement of its populations brought about by technology has sufficiently changed the universe of discourse so that those who consider language and culture must re-examine old definitions. Extreme cultural relativism -the idea that particular cultures differ as categorically as light and dark-has been eroded by social movement. Cultures may be separable, but people enculturated in them do move about, and cultural diversity does not invalidate the concepts of culture and community; it reveals, however, as Turner argues, that these terms and the meanings different people attach to them need careful scrutiny. Deaf people, wherever they live, share more or less fully in the wider culture of the nation, region, or tribe they belong to. The extent to which they share that culture, however, is determined first and foremost by the attitude toward deafness and deaf people that is part of that culture. Next in importance is the hearing status of their family members and communicative partners, and then come other factors, not least of which are the age when they became deaf and the educational opportunities that the wider culture affords to deaf people. Thus, the culture of the deaf members of a population, as Turner argues, cannot be sharply separated from the culture of the hearing majority they live among--even if that culture is definable, which perhaps is the question Turner and the others are addressing. But neither can the culture of deaf populations be subsumed in the culture of the hearing majority...