Studying Deaf Culture: an Introduction to Ethnographic Work in Deaf Communities
Temas
Detalles
As the late James Spradley pointed out, "Deafness isfar more than a loss of hearing. Deafness is a social and cultural condition" (1981:x). The four ethnographic studies that follow focus on the social and cultural sides of deafness. One of the key strengths of a cultural perspective isthat it allows one to see how dramatically deaf people's lives vary. We are particularly pleased, therefore, at the breadth of the papers presented here. Two papers are on American Deaf communities, and two are on foreign communities with deaf people. Stephanie Hall explores Deaf culture as found in a Deaf Club ina large American city, while Leila Monaghan discusses the interplay between Deaf and Christian identities in two Deaf Churches inthe suburbs of Washington, D.C. Robert E. Johnson observes the deaf inhabitants of a rural Mayan village in Mexico, while Jill Jepson discusses different levels of acceptance and rejection of deafness inurban and rural India. The first drafts of these papers were originally part of asession on the ethnographies of Deaf communities at the 1990 American Anthropological Association meeting in New Orleans.