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Please forward to interested colleagues. DEADLINE VERY
SOON.<br><br>
This is a call for papers for a proposed session at the American
Anthropological Association meetings, November 17-21 in San
Francisco. Since sessions must be submitted by April 1, please
indicate interest as soon as possible to session organizers -- Frank
Bechter
(<a href="mailto:fbechter@uchicago.edu">fbechter@uchicago.edu</a>) and
Peter Graif
(<a href="mailto:pjgraif@uchicago.edu">pjgraif@uchicago.edu</a>).
We will need to have rough descriptions by Monday, March 29, at the
latest (i.e., in one week's time), and participants must submit completed
abstracts (250 words) on-line to the AAA by April 1. Below is the
session abstract, to be supplemented once proposals are received.
The session is conceived as the first stage in pursuing an edited volume.
<br><br>
For conference information and guidelines, go to
<a href="http://www.aaanet.org/mtgs/mtgs.htm">http://www.aaanet.org/mtgs/mtgs.htm</a>.
Feel free also to contact Frank Bechter
(<a href="mailto:fbechter@uchicago.edu">fbechter@uchicago.edu</a>) with
questions.<br><br>
<b>Deaf Studies' critical challenge to social theory<br><br>
</b>In the past two decades, anthropological study of deaf signers has
shown that primary categories of social description -- language, culture,
"ethnicity," identity -- can be applied to the deaf. In
this way, and against a long history of systematic disenfranchisement of
deaf signers, the categories of social and linguistic theory are thus
employed to understand deaf signers as a more-or-less "normal"
linguistic minority, having their own community organizations, folklore,
literary forms, etiquette, internal sociolinguistic variation, and even
typical forms of gender, race and class bias. The deaf cultural community
is thus advanced as an ethnographic domain wherein already-constituted
insights of social and linguistic theory can be evidenced, albeit with
minor adjustments to account for signing versus speaking. In this
way, the study of the deaf not only legitimates the deaf along particular
theoretical dimensions, but, indeed, functions to legitimate these
theoretical dimensions themselves, with the unstated corollary that any
aspect of deaf social life which violates precepts of these scholarly
discourses will be quietly sidelined.<br><br>
But what if heretofore sidelined aspects of deaf life are, in fact, what
is most fundamental to the deaf, and to any understanding of them?
Indeed, what <i>are</i> the precepts at issue? Thus, for example,
the study of the deaf has focused on deaf families, where cultural
transmission is in sympathy with a classic perspective -- and yet, deaf
signers come overwhelmingly from non-deaf families. Linguists,
meanwhile, have argued for an SVO structure to ASL, but the highest
aesthetic form of signing ("ASL storytelling") often contains
no SVO constructions, nor, indeed, any linear syntax
whatsoever.<br><br>
This panel takes the empirical facts of deaf signing populations (in the
US and elsewhere) as its starting points, granting from the outset the
"cultural" status of deaf signing communities, and the
"linguistic" status of deaf signing systems, as essentially
obvious -- not in need of legitimization, but rather standing as daunting
invitations to better theorization of culture and language. Paper
abstracts are thus invited which pursue this aim. On the one hand,
the goal of the panel is simply to understand the deaf community and its
forms. At the same time, however, we maintain that this is not
possible in the absence of real theoretical innovation. Such
innovations should be of value in a range of cultural and ethnographic
contexts, and papers exploring this possibility are encouraged.<br><br>
Session organizers:<br><br>
Frank Bechter - fbechter@uchicago.edu<br>
Peter Graif - pjgraif@uchicago.edu<br>
Dept. of Anthropology<br>
University of Chicago<br>
Chicago, IL 60637 </body>
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