The Deaf Way

Les sourds, c’est comme ça, by Yves Delaporte (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2002, 398 pp. 28 . ISBN 2735109356. ISSN 0758 5888).

This volume presents an ethnographic account of the signing Deaf community of France, a population traditionally known as sourd-muet, deaf-mute. For reasons that I discuss briefly in this review, the use of the term muet in France (and the corresponding term in the United States) has fallen out of popular favor. A reviewer discussing this book in English is immediately faced with the question of how to translate the title. At first glance, something like The Deaf, That’s How It Is might seem appropriate. However, consideration of the French Sign Language (LSF) sign that Delaporte translates into French as c’est comme ça suggests an alternate (American) English title. Because of a shared linguistic heritage, the same sign with the same meaning exists in American Sign Language (ASL). As Delaporte explains (113–20), the LSF sign originated as the third-person possessive pronoun and retained its current meaning as a new sign for the pronoun evolved. In its current meaning, it is a tag for descriptions of behavior that French deaf people take as being particularly illustrative of their culture—almost always expressed in terms of its differences from the culture of the dominant hearing/speaking majority. In this regard, when it follows the sign for “deaf,” it might be translated as “the deaf, it’s their thing.” In ASL, the sign retains its function as the possessive pronoun as well as the meaning just described in FSL, and the whole phrase, beginning with the sign for “deaf,” has been translated into English as “the deaf way,” the English name and ASL sign phrase for two international festivals celebrating the arts and culture of the world Deaf community, sponsored by Gallaudet University.

What is significant about all of this is the self-definition of the Deaf community according to its “alterity,” or otherness—its fundamental separation from the hearing population within which it is immersed. The central fact of life for deaf people in industrial societies, especially people born deaf, is the difficulty posed by the need to communicate with hearing people. For the deaf people of France and the rest of Europe and perhaps to a lesser extent those of North America, this problem has been compounded since the 1880s by the refusal of the educational establishment to allow them to be educated in their own natural signed languages, accompanied by attempts to prevent the use of these languages even outside the classroom. Delaporte reveals the complicity of the medical establishment in the denial of deafness and mutism—defining them as medical problems to be overcome by prosthesis and rigid oral training, with parents avoiding the use of sign language at all costs. The typical result has been a more or less complete failure of the formal educational process. These restrictions are only now being eased in much of the Western world, to be replaced by a new form of prosthesis, the cochlear implant, seen by signing Deaf communities as a new threat to their viability.

The case of cochlear implants is particularly revealing of the central difference between the deaf and all other cultural and linguistic groups. Less than 10 percent of deaf children have deaf parents, and perhaps 90 percent of the children of deaf adults are hearing. Thus, the medical and educational destinies of most deaf children are controlled by hearing parents. The language and culture, in general, are not transmitted in the usual way, from parents to their children. Instead, these have been transmitted to the signing deaf in educational establishments, prototypically residential schools for deaf children, although the tiny minority of deaf people who come from multigenerational deaf families plays a disproportionate role in this process.

The histories of Deaf communities, and especially the French Deaf community, are to a great extent the histories of the great residential...