FW: 2011 AAA panel : Decolonizing Indigenous and Village Sign Languages.

[Adam Schembri]

I'm not sure that many (anyone?) in the field of village sign language linguistics refers to these languages as 'primitive', but this is a very important workshop nonetheless.

Adam
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Associate Professor Adam Schembri
Director, National Institute for Deaf Studies and Sign Language
La Trobe University | Melbourne (Bundoora) | Victoria |  3086 |  Australia
Tel: +61 3 9479 2887 | Fax: +61 3 9479 3074 | www.latrobe.edu.au/nids

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From: Erich Fox Tree [mailto:efoxtree at hamilton.edu]
Sent: Friday, 11 March 2011 3:37 AM

Call for Papers for the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings in Montreal, Canada, November 16-20, 2011:

DECOLONIZING INDIGENOUS AND VILLAGE SIGN LANGUAGES
BY SEEING THE SILENT

  “Immature,”  “inchoate,”  “less complex,” “limited in range,” “primitive,” “of peripheral importance,” or at a lower stage in the “normal” developmental cycle of sign languages: Recent academic descriptions of the sign languages of indigenous groups or of small, bimodally-bilingual rural communities with high incidences of deafness, are distressingly reminiscent of missionary-linguists’ characterizations of the spoken vernaculars of colonized Natives centuries ago. What similar colonial relationships do the modern claims encode?
 Since Stokoe (1960) proved that American Sign Language, ASL, was a real language, with a systematic structure and grammar, scholarship has contested the general colonization of the Deaf by challenging claims that signers are intellectually deprived or socially immature. It has also invigorated efforts to gain recognition and support for national sign languages, and thereby helped change patronizing oralist models of education for many deaf people not only in the USA, but in other industrialized countries.
 Yet the indigenous and village sign languages that constitute much of the diversity of the world’s natural sign languages have not enjoyed important advances made by national sign languages.  They face intensifying marginalization, domination, and endangerment, and scholars have scarcely studied their plight, let alone their structures and usage. Indigenous and village sign languages are crucial not only for scientific and humanistic understanding of human language (Nonaka 2003), but for issues of linguistic, indigenous, and human rights, especially as their predicament may be driven not only by hearing hegemonies, but also by those of national sign languages.
This panel brings together established and new cultural scholars to examine this double-colonialism ofindigenous and village sign languages: colonization both AS SIGN LANGUAGES and BY SIGN LANGUAGES.  Case studies question how advancements by official and aspiring national sign languages sometimes come at the expense of other sign language.  They ask how scholarly claims of isolation, minority status, and recent origin reduce the legitimacy of indigenous and village sign communities. What do new theories about the development of sign languages mean for anthropological ideals of cultural survival and relativism? Does advocacy for national sign languages replicate nationalists’ imagining of communities around single spoken vernaculars? Can sign languages persist without Deaf schools, modern technologies, and video capitalism?  How does denial of existence, complexity, and rights, or premature classification as “minority” languages help suppress linguistic, ethnic, and cultural diversity? Does promotion of “modern” features, such as signed alphabets, create a hierarchy of sign codes, while aiding standardization of spoken languages? In short, how do hearing authorities and promoters of national (or international) sign languages collaborate to “silence” indigenous and village ones?
  Through its focus on the invisible “voices” of indigenous and village signers, this panel aims to help them. Diverse case studies from North America, to Asia, Africa and Mesoamerica advocate more intense study of indigenous and village sign languages.  Going beyond description of linguistic contact, competition, and conflict, papers support increased collaboration between advocates of national sign languages and indigenous or village signers to consider how law, scholarship, and economic practices might better empower both communities.

TO HAVE YOUR PAPER CONSIDERED FOR THIS PANEL, contact Dr. Erich Fox Tree (efoxtree at hamilton.edu<mailto:efoxtree at hamilton.edu>).

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Prof. Erich  Fox Tree
Department of Religious Studies
Hamilton College
198 College Hill Road
Clinton NY, 13323
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