Deaf Culture Working

REVIEW ARTICLE: DEAF CULTURE WORKING William C. Stokoe If Paul Bohannon's book' had been available just a year earlier , the contents of much of the 1994 volume of Sign Language Studies might have been quite different. Discussion in issues 83, 84, 85 prompted by Graham Turner's call for a new look at "community" and "culture," particularly when modified by "Deaf," could have been better directed had the participants in the print symposium considered Bohannon's demonstration that culture is not a verb (Turner in SLS 83:115, Street SLS 83:145148 ) but that culture is a tool (1995:167-171). Bohannon does not discard the venerable anthropological tradition that saw cultures as systems with a discernible structurea tradition that participants in (and cited in) the print symposium have more or less consciously followed. Instead he shows how that tradition can change, and so make use of the abundant evidence that cultures grow and evolve, because as structures they are not static but dynamic-tools by means of which societies operate, change, develop, and sometimes even cease to be, as when their values no longer fit existing conditions-"cultural traps." He also takes up in the middle chapters the preoccupation of many anthropologists with colonialism and hegemony-topics treated in the symposium and obviously related to hearing/deaf relationships; but he does not approve ofdescribing social conditions and consequent cultural structures as they were in the past, or as they developed from past events. That is work he considers more suitable for historians than for anthropologists interested in culture. His preference is for an anthropology that finds out how ideas and things are, how they got that way, and where they are headed. 1 Bohannon, P.How Culture Works. NY: Free Press. 1995. ix &217 pp. ISBN 0-02-904505-3. @1995, Linstok Press, Inc. ISSN 0302-1475 Stokoe In the preface he calls "Road Map," Bohannon writes that "culture does not have a useful companionate verb, as life has its cognate to live." Further: Inthe present exercise, culture isaverb more inthe conceptual than inthe grammatical sense.... Two assumptions underlie this exercise: * there isatime dimension to all culture, and * one state of culture often leads to another (inways that do not, as well as ways that do, imply cultural evolution). (vii) He opens the exercise with a lucid relation of culture to matter and life: Matter iswhat everything inthe universe ismade of, including us-the elemental constituents of human bodies follow the rules of chemistry and physics. Until life isadded, matter isinert . The biological condition imbues matter with qualities that are absent in non-living matter: Life is a way of organizing matter. Ittransforms matter, but does not inthe least affect the principles according to which matter works. Living matter can be transformed yet again-by culture. Culture transcends and enriches matter and life but does not change the way physics, chemistry, or biology work. Culture emerges from life just as life emerges from matter. (3) Two pages later Bohannon states what many of us in last year's print symposium seem to have been struggling to express: Matter isdifficultto define because there isnothing more basic to reduce itto. Life, being even more difficult to define, was at one time called "amystery." Defining culture has proved all but impossible. Yet we know what culture is,just as we know what life and matter are. Allthree are what we might call rockbottom perceptions-they cannot be definitionally simplified. (5) The three parts of the book are "Culture in the natural world" (3-45), "Cultural dynamics" (49-143), and "Working with culture " (147-197)-not many pages for subjects so important; but the simplicity and elegance of Bohannon's thinking and writing make a contribution far out of proportion to the book's length. All who contributed to the Deaf culture symposium in the preceding issues ought to read How Culture Works without delay; the same applies to all who have read the contributions and wondered if there can be any resolution to the questions and doubts there raised. Bohannon does not offer answers, of course, to the SLS 86 Deaf culture working vexing questions about Deaf community and Deaf culture, but he...