Review of "Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India" by Michele Friedner
Rashmi Sadana2016, American Anthropologist
https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12579This engaging and skillful ethnography of young deaf people in Bangalore marks a critical contribution to disability studies as well as to scholarship on language ideologies and neoliberal India. The book's five chapters follow the linear development of young people from family to school to church to NGO and business worlds. However, the chapters are also arranged as a constellation of urban institutions and thus demonstrate how key concepts in deaf worlds circulate among them. The ethnography begins when Michele Friedner identifies another deaf woman on a crowded Bangalore bus using a phrase common among " deafs " in India: " deaf deaf same " (p. 2). This idiom and moment of recognition become a central concept in the book, which is indeed about " deaf worlds, " how they are created, the value that may be extracted from them, and how these worlds are inextricably linked to " normal " ones, another local idiom used throughout to great analytical effect. From the start, Friedner identifies sites, practices, and structures of feeling that are vital to " deaf development, " an idea that encapsulates the desire to be part of deaf worlds and to communicate among and between them. Being in and of these worlds and the moral imperatives of such a life are key to this rich text. Chapter 1 is compelling for the author's attempt to understand and reconceptualize the meaning of family for young, deaf Bangalurus. In short, as Friedner shows, family is an impediment to deaf kids in terms of the development of their deaf sociality. The families she gets to know , while well meaning, want their deaf children to be normal, and so they push them toward oral learning, which, it turns out, is a terrible way for deaf people to learn, resulting in " not-learning " or learning in a " half-half-half " way. Curiously, the most respected deaf schools in India also promote oral education, and Friedner takes us to Chennai, where those schools are located. Part of the problem is that oral education is not matched with the appropriate technologies and expertise to align each deaf person's disability with the proper hearing aid (or implant) and its monitoring. In addition, oralism not so subtly denigrates the use of sign language, which is the mother tongue of the deaf, although not recognized by the Indian state. As a result, deaf Indian kids don't learn much in school, which becomes a lifelong condition leading to normalized practices such as copying (first exams, later CVs), which in turn homogenizes deaf experience in the workplace. What deafs do gain in deaf schools are friends, real friends, because even though sign language is looked down upon by normals and even by most deaf educators in the Indian context (who are rarely deaf