The Nature of Signs: Nepal's Deaf Society, Local Sign, and the Production of Communicative Sociality

This dissertation centers on two sites in deaf Nepal to examine how the relationship between communication and sociality is constituted, negotiated, and discussed in circumstances when language cannot be taken for granted./nThe decades following the founding of Nepal's first deaf school in 1966 have witnessed the simultaneous emergence and dissemination of "deaf society" and the communicative practices now known as Nepali Sign Language (NSL). Despite growing numbers of deaf-run organizations and educational facilities for the deaf, NSL signers still constitute a very small percentage of all deaf Nepalis. This dissertation is based on extensive fieldwork with both NSL signers and with deaf people who communicate using what NSL signers call "natural sign," a limited repertoire of signs shared by deaf and hearing people./nThe first part of the dissertation focuses on NSL signers in Kathmandu. Drawing on participant-observation and video-recorded speeches, interviews, and conversations, I show that older NSL signers remember - and take credit for - the emergence of NSL as an historical event, that younger NSL signers recall acquiring it in childhood or even adulthood, and that NSL signers of all ages also regularly use natural sign to communicate with hearing people and deaf people who do not know NSL. Shaped by this particular sociolinguistic field, I argue, NSL signers both value NSL and recognize that communication is possible in its absence. Yet the latter, deaf discourses reveal, is characterized by interactional vulnerability, as hearing people in particular may treat deaf people as unintelligible./nThe second part of the dissertation concentrates on my research in Maunabudhuk and Bodhe Village Development Committees (eastern Nepal) with participants in an NSL class for adults. Through participant-observation and video-recordings of interactions, I analyze signers' extant everyday communicative practices with each other, with hearing family members and neighbors, and with the deaf NSL teacher. I show that interactions in "local sign," as Nepali speakers in the area say, are characterized by a high degree of conventionality, as well as by a patchwork of understanding and not-understanding. In the final chapter I track how hearing participants in signed conversations display and enact shifting orientations that both reflect and affect the possibilities and limitations of unfolding interactions. Echoing NSL signers' own critique of deaf-hearing relationships, I demonstrate that the production of deaf people as intelligible signers requires willing addressees./nThe dissertation makes five inter-related contributions to research at the intersection of linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, sign language linguistics, and Deaf Studies. First, it offers detailed ethnographic descriptions of deaf society in Kathmandu and of deaf villagers in eastern Nepal. Second, it provides fine-grained analyses of interactional practices among deaf and hearing local signers and between deaf local signers and an NSL signer. Third, it demonstrates that natural and local signing practices exceed scholarly categories of signed communication. Fourth, it reveals how communication, particularly when the linguistic system is lean and unevenly shared, is fundamentally ethical in nature. Finally, it brings together academic and deaf NSL signers' own theories to analyze the ethics of communication.

Advisor: Hanks, William F