[Linganth] Mara Green on her book, Making Sense

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today on the blog, Mara Green answers Timothy Loh's questions about

 her book, *Making Sense: Language, Ethics, and Understanding in Deaf Nepal*
.


www.campanthropology.org


Best,

Ilana


Press blurb: *Making Sense* explores the experiential, ethical, and
intellectual stakes of living in, and thinking with, worlds wherein
language cannot be taken for granted. In Nepal, many deaf signers use
Nepali Sign Language (NSL), a young, conventional signed language. The
majority of deaf Nepalis, however, use what NSL signers call *natural sign*.
Natural sign involves conventional and improvisatory signs, many of which
recruit semiotic relations immanent in the social and material world. These
features make conversation in natural sign both possible and precarious.
Sense-making in natural sign depends on signers' skillful use of resources
and on addressees' willingness to engage. Natural sign reveals the labor of
sense-making that in more conventional language is carried by shared
grammar. Ultimately, this highly original book shows that emergent language
is an ethical endeavor, challenging readers to consider what it means, and
what it takes, to understand and to be understood.
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