Abstract
This article examines jāt (‘caste, ethnicity’) through the lens of signed conversations in contemporary eastern Nepal, where both intimacy and inequality characterise inter-jāt relations. Local deaf and hearing people refer in sign to a person’s jāt with an action taken as emblematic of that jāt, such as drinking alcohol. Signers use the same phrases to discuss persons’ actions, which may or may not conform to typifications. Analysing signed discourse reveals that people negotiate a shifting social landscape through an approach to bodies as ontologically dual, belonging both to selves with idiosyncratic habits and to jāt groups with prescribed and proscribed practices.
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