Comment on Turner

COMMENT ON TURNER by William Stokoe I would like to claim an editor's privilege here: First, in opening sections of Sign Language Structure (1960) the word culture appears eighteen times and the viewpoint is clearly stated-that culture and language are inseparable, different aspects really of the same hard-to-define matter that has occupied much of this and earlier issues of the journal. I was and am more deeply interested in the use of languages and sign languages than in universals of language. That monograph, reissued in 1994, was written during and after direct contact with George L. Trager and Henry L. Smith, Jr., notable in their day as linguists but by their choice operating in a department of anthropology -as they pointed out, sterility is the result of studying a language without studying its use and those who use it. Since 1960, however, many have turned away from looking at language in use and what it is used for to argue that complex but identical instructions covering the grammar of every language are built into every human brain by conjectured genes; but from the time I began teaching at Gallaudet in 1955 it was obvious to me that my students and colleagues-using vision and gesture instead of hearing and speech to communicate-had a language and hence a culture that differs in interesting ways from speechexpressed languages. Most likely because of my age and philological background, I am moved to comment not only by Turner's conclusions but by other comments; e.g.: The notion of a culture or the culture of the deaf makes no sense anthropologically since itis evident that deaf people live in varied social and cultural conditions rather than ina single reified state. (Street, 1994:145) Culture and community but anthropology as well have different meanings for different observers. I have believed since 1955 that it makes perfect sense to speak of the culture of a particular deaf group, simply because the best indicator of any culture is the language used by the group. And after sitting under Trager and Smith in 1957, I cannot mistake culture for a verb; it is a name for a system of shared communication. Of course communication @1994 Linstok Press, Inc. Note inside front cover ISSN 0302-1475 265 SLS 83 implies sharing; but the phrase is not redundant, for it is instead a shorter way of saying "shared modes, manners, and matters communicated ." The operative verb is behave: Culture dictates which behaviors are normal, allowed, proper, or bizarre and which are sanctioned or unthinkable. The term is system. The use of the term implies that one may locate and isolate elements and even reify them, but in that case a system ceases to be a system; for when a part of it is removed or mishandled-as any user of personal computer hardware and software knows very well-the system crashes.I Unfortunately, Edward T. Hall, Jr., who was asked to comment on Turner, was unable to do so because of other commitments . His address at The Deaf Way conference in 1989 (1994) should be a part of this symposium on culture, for in it he used the term "micro-culture" and showed how the culture of the Deaf community in America and elsewhere can be related both to the concept of culture and the particular circumstances of deafness. Even more unfortunately Hall's Silent Language(1959) is less well known than it should be, for in it he shows how communication consists of much more than language utterances; it consists of ten primary message systems, by means of which members of a culture communicate everything (1959:222f). These ten: Interaction , Association, Subsistence, Bisexuality, Territoriality, Temporality, Learning, Play, Defense, and Exploitation-each of which can be looked at from the viewpoint of each of the others -do not reify or attempt to reify something as abstract as the system that is culture; but the one hundred conceptual spaces that these ten subtend by their intersections with each other cover a broad area. Like the grids made of stretched used by archaeologists (anthropologists of another branch) to suspend above a dig, Hall's cognitive grid helps...