The Deaf Way

Abstract

The Deaf Way Les sourds, c'est comme ca, by Yves Delaporte (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 2002, 398 pp. 28 . ISBN 2735109356. ISSN 0758 5888). THIS VOLUME PRESENTS an ethnographic account of signing Deaf community of France, a population traditionally known as sourd-muet, deaf-mute. For reasons that I discuss briefly in this review, use of term muet in France (and corresponding term in United States) has fallen out of popular favor. A reviewer discussing this book in English is immediately faced with question of how to translate title. At first glance, something like The Deaf, That's How It Is might seem appropriate. However, consideration of French Sign Language (LSF) sign that Delaporte translates into French as c'est comme ca suggests an alternate (American) English title. Because of a shared linguistic heritage, same sign with same meaning exists in American Sign Language (ASL). As Delaporte explains (i 13-20), LSF sign originated as third-person possessive pronoun and retained its current meaning as a new sign for 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 culture of dominant hearing/speaking majority. In this regard, when it follows sign for it might be translated as the deaf, it's their thing. In ASL, sign retains its function as possessive pronoun as well as meaning just described in FSL, and whole phrase, beginning with sign for has been translated into English as the deaf English name and ASL sign phrase for two international festivals celebrating arts and culture of world Deaf community, sponsored by Gallaudet University. What is significant about all of this is self-definition of Deaf community according to its alterity, or otherness-its fundamental separation from hearing population within which it is immersed. The central fact of life for deaf people in industrial societies, especially people born deaf, is difficulty posed by need to communicate with hearing people. For deaf people of France and rest of Europe and perhaps to a lesser extent those of North America, this problem has been compounded since i88os by refusal of educational establishment to allow them to be educated in their own natural signed languages, accompanied by attempts to prevent use of these languages even outside classroom. DeIaporte reveals complicity of medical establishment in denial of deafness and mutism-defining them as medical problems to be overcome by prosthesis and rigid oral training, with parents avoiding use of sign language at all costs. The typical result has been a more or less complete failure of formal educational process. These restrictions are only now being eased in much of Western world, to be replaced by a new form of prosthesis, cochlear implant, seen by signing Deaf communities as a new threat to their viability. The case of cochlear implants is particularly revealing of central difference between deaf and all other cultural and linguistic groups. Less than 10 percent of deaf children have deaf parents, and perhaps 90 percent of children of deaf adults are hearing. Thus, medical and educational destinies of most deaf children are controlled by hearing parents. The language and culture, in general, are not transmitted in usual way, from parents to their children. Instead, these have been transmitted to signing deaf in educational establishments, prototypically residential schools for deaf children, although 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 French Deaf community, are to a great extent histories of great residential schools (see Lane 1984; Van Cleve and Crouch 1989). …