[Linganth] CALL FOR PAPERS, AAA: Deaf Studies' critical challenge to social theory

[Frank Bechter]

Please forward to interested colleagues.  DEADLINE VERY SOON.

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
(<mailto:fbechter at uchicago.edu>fbechter at uchicago.edu) and Peter Graif
(<mailto:pjgraif at uchicago.edu>pjgraif at uchicago.edu).  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.

For conference information and guidelines, go to
<http://www.aaanet.org/mtgs/mtgs.htm>http://www.aaanet.org/mtgs/mtgs.htm.
Feel free also to contact Frank Bechter
(<mailto:fbechter at uchicago.edu>fbechter at uchicago.edu) with questions.

Deaf Studies' critical challenge to social theory

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.

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 are 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.

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.

Session organizers:

Frank Bechter - fbechter at uchicago.edu
Peter Graif - pjgraif at uchicago.edu
Dept. of Anthropology
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL  60637
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