Signing and Belonging in Nepal

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway

• Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781563686658
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

While many deaf organizations around the world have adopted an ethno-linguistic framing of deafness, the meanings and consequences of this perspective vary across cultural contexts, andrelatively little scholarship exists that explores this framework from an anthropological perspective.
In this book, Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway presents an accessible examination of deafness in Nepal. As a linguistic anthropologist, she describes the emergence of Nepali Sign Language and deaf sociality in the social and historical context of Nepal during the last decades before the Hindu Kingdom became a secular republic. She then shows how the adoption of an ethno-linguistic model interacted with the ritual pollution model, or the prior notion that deafness results from bad karma. Her focus is on the impact of these competing and co-existing understandings of deafness on three groups: signers who adopted deafness as an ethnic identity, homesigners whose ability to adopt that identity is hindered by their difficulties in acquiring Nepali Sign Language, and hearing Nepalis who interact with Deaf signers. Comparing these contexts demonstrates that both the ethno-linguistic model and the ritual pollution model, its seeming foil, draw on the same basic premise: that both persons and larger social formations are mutually constituted through interaction. Signing and Belonging in Nepal is an ethnography that studies a rich and unique Deaf culture while also contributing to larger discussions about social reproduction and social change.

“I See That You Are Deaf”

1

FIGURES 1 AND 2 portray deaf Nepalis moving through a public place. The first image shows a mother, a father, and a child walking down a street (the traffic light suggests an urban context, possibly Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital city). As they walk past couples chatting and shopkeepers interacting with their customers, the parents take pains to silence their deaf son (as his vocalizations would likely make his deafness apparent) and prevent him from using his hands to gesture or sign (which would likewise reveal his deafness). The son looks confused and disturbed. In the second drawing, the same family is walking down the same street, but in this instance the parents and the child are happily using sign language to communicate with each other in public. Readers will notice, however, that, rather than going about their business as in the first drawing, the bystanders have all stopped what they were doing to gawk at the signing family, looking shocked and displeased.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Pratigya Shakya,¹ a Deaf ² Nepali artist, produced these drawings, which capture important aspects of Deaf social life in Nepal during the historical period I describe in this book: that of a decade-long civil war (1996–2006) that transformed the Hindu Kingdom into a secular republic. At that time, many deaf Nepalis, particularly those in urban centers, had begun to adopt and promote the idea that Deaf signers constituted a distinct, but marginalized, ethnolinguistic group, identified and constituted by the use of a particular language, Nepali Sign Language (NSL). Within this model, one’s status as Deaf was thus not based on an inability to hear per se but on competence in a sign language and engagement in Deaf social networks. These networks extended beyond Nepal, as local associations of Deaf people formed social, financial, and ideological relationships with a range of international Deaf persons and organizations that had been instrumental in introducing this framework to the country.

From an ethnolinguistic perspective, a person should not hide their Deafness; rather, through displays of NSL use it was possible to claim membership in a social group both close knit and far ranging. However, even as this understanding of Deafness had been adopted and championed by members of Deaf social networks in primarily urban settings, deafness continued to carry highly negative connotations for the hearing majority: “seeing that someone was d/Deaf” could have a wide range of social consequences in Nepal.

Indeed, although organizations of Deaf people around the globe were increasingly adopting ethnolinguistic framings of Deafness, leading some to speak of an emerging transnational “Deaf-World” (e.g., Lane 2005), the meanings and consequences of this perspective varied within and across cultural contexts (Monaghan et al. 2003; Friedner and Kusters 2014). For example, in the United States, ethnolinguistic understandings of Deafness emerged in contrast to a biomedical perspective, in which deafness was seen as a physical disability.³ However, a biomedical framework was not the most widespread alternative understanding of the nature and consequences of deafness in Nepal. Though this perspective was salient in some parts of the country, the most common alternative belief was that an inability to hear was the result of bad karma, or misdeeds in a previous life. Karma was thought to influence a person’s relative degree of personal purity or pollution, which could be transmitted to others through contact. As a result, deafness was highly stigmatized, and deaf persons were often shunned.

These different binaries (ethnolinguistic vs. biomedical; ethnolinguistic vs. karmic) were reflected and reproduced by the different terms used to refer to d/Deaf persons in these settings. In the United States (and indeed, in this book), a terminological distinction is often made in writing between the terms “deaf” and “Deaf.” The uncapitalized spelling refers only to audiological impairment, whereas the capitalized version indicates self-identification as a member of a signing community. The d/Deaf distinction in the United States thus contrasted disability and ethnolinguistic frameworks, in which “deaf” was typically (mis)understood by hearing speakers as a socially neutral term.

In Nepal, on the other hand, different understandings of d/Deafness were often mapped onto distinct Nepali-language terms: lā

o and bahirā (or bahiro). Lā

o, a pejorative term meaning “deaf and dumb” in the literal and the figurative senses, reflected the stigma surrounding deafness. Deaf leaders often pointed out that the term lā

o indicated a lack of communicative or intellectual ability rather than simply hearing loss; signers, therefore, were exempted from such a state and should be referred to as bahirā. Broadly, bahirā connoted a more positive view of d/Deaf people and often an alignment with an ethnolinguistic perspective on Deafness as well.

Lā

o was by far the most widely known term among hearing Nepalis during my research. For example, in 2005 I traveled through Mustang (a remote mountainous region in the north of Nepal), searching for deaf persons for an informal survey I was conducting for the National Federation of the Deaf Nepal. On reaching each village, I would ask whether any bahirā mānchhe (deaf people) were in residence. I usually received a blank stare or a negative response. But if I used the term lā

o, my interlocutor would often indicate understanding and reply that there were “dumb” people living in the village.⁴ This posed a problem: Understandably, the term lā

o had become highly politicized by the associations of Deaf people in Kathmandu as a symbol of the larger society’s negative characterization of deafness. Groups such as the Kathmandu Association of the Deaf had campaigned vigorously to remove the term from media accounts that focused on their activities. Accordingly, I felt very uncomfortable using the term lā

o even though its alternative, bahirā, was often not understood in the villages I was visiting. Ultimately I settled on an awkward formulation, kān-na-suune mānchhe (“people whose ears do not hear”), supplemented occasionally with mukh-na-bolne mānchhe (“people whose mouths do not speak”).

The predominance of the term lā

o was not restricted to rural areas. During my first trip to Nepal in 1997, and on later visits in 2001 and 2004–2006, when I would walk down the street chatting in NSL with Deaf friends in Kathmandu, the hearing people we passed would often gape (as in Shakya’s illustration) and make comments about us, assuming that I was deaf or that, as a videshi (foreigner), I would not understand their spoken Nepali. I overhead observers almost exclusively use the stigmatizing term lā

o while discussing us.⁵ Such a situation, in which outsiders do not use a group’s preferred ethnonym (name used to refer to an ethnic group), out of refusal or ignorance, was an experience shared by many other stigmatized ethnolinguistic groups in Nepal.⁶

Though the karmic and ethnolinguistic framings of d/Deafness might seem diametrically opposed, attention to the convergence of, as well as contrasts between, these models is necessary to understand the social transformations through which Nepal’s Deaf community has emerged and continues to grow and change. For example, although d/Deaf Nepalis were often believed to be capable of polluting others, they were not unique in this respect: During the period in which Deaf Nepalis began to adopt and enact an ethnolinguistic model of Deafness, most social groups in Nepal were associated with hierarchically ranked degrees of pollution or purity, believed to derive from karma, which could likewise be transmitted through interaction. For example, if a hearing person was born into a low-caste social group that was associated with pollution, this, too, was considered a karmic consequence. Accordingly, to describe Deaf people as an ethnolinguistic group did not in and of itself refute an association with bad karma and pollution. As I show in chapter 3, to combat this stigma, leaders of the associations of Deaf people sought to link a standardized NSL—and with it an emerging Deaf social category—with practices and symbols of high-caste Hinduism that connoted good karma and purity.

These efforts were also responsive to the political situation in Nepal during the historical era (1997–2006) described in this book. This period was a time of increased political mobilization by many of the country’s marginalized ethnolinguistic groups, who protested that the state’s framing of Nepali nationalism was grounded in symbols and practices that marginalized them. This tension was one important driver of the Maoist “People’s War”, which ravaged the country from 1996 to 2006 and ultimately led to the aforementioned transition of the country from a Hindu kingdom to a secular republic. One of the primary means by which such ethnic groups defined themselves was through the claim of a mother tongue other than Nepali. As Deaf Nepalis adopted an ethnolinguistic model of deafness, they became potentially aligned with other marginalized, but increasingly politically active, ethnolinguistic groups in Nepal. This alignment risked exposing them to the governmental discrimination and oppression such groups often encountered during that period. Deaf leaders’ efforts to associate NSL with high-caste practices also linked the language to Nepali nationalism, thereby making Deaf identity politics less subject to repression by the state. At the same time, however, the standardization project complicated the ability of some Deaf Nepalis to simultaneously affiliate with Deaf and birth social networks.

Similarly, a given person’s inclusion in a Deaf category was determined by the intersection of ethnolinguistic and karmic understandings of personhood. The stigma of deafness in Nepal could lead to the social and linguistic isolation of deaf children, such that some were not able to acquire language in childhood. Those who were first exposed to NSL in adulthood were often highly constrained in their ability to learn the language. Accordingly, their inclusion in a Deaf social category could be problematic. However, just as the ritual pollution associated with deafness could be shared through social contact, so could other qualities such as competence. By copying the signs of competent signers, some such Nepalis were permitted to share that competence and partake in a Deaf identity based in NSL (see chapter 4).

Interactions between karmic and ethnolinguistic models of d/Deafness in Nepal also affected hearing Nepalis who interacted with Deaf signers. At the time of my research, the dominant understanding was that deaf people transmitted ritual pollution to hearing people. Despite that widespread belief, and despite the fact that food was an especially effective medium for the transmission of such pollution, from 1997 on a popular restaurant chain in Kathmandu began to hire Deaf waitstaff and prominently advertise their presence. While karma and the attendant belief in ritual pollution were significant idioms for structuring social relations, during the period under discussion, bikās (development), class, and modernity had come gradually to coexist and/or compete with karma as important social frameworks. By taking food from servers traditionally considered polluted and, increasingly, using NSL signs to place orders, hearing clientele could demonstrate bikāsi (“developed,” in contrast to “undeveloped” or “backward”) qualities by rejecting the ritual pollution model (see chapter 5). This practice simultaneously combated and reinforced the stigma surrounding deafness during this period.

The primary argument of this book is thus that, rather than outright rejecting local understandings of personhood and social groups based in notions of karma and transmissible purity and pollution, Deaf signers employed them in producing Deafness as an ethnolinguistic category in Nepal. Indeed, as the following chapters show, both the ethnolinguistic and karmic models of d/Deafness ultimately drew on the same basic premise: that persons and larger social formations are mutually constituted through interaction. Further, just as the framing of NSL and Deaf as mutually constitutive drew on both contrasts and convergences between models for understanding d/Deafness, the meanings and effects of such interactive processes hinged on both similarity and variation in embodied practices, including language use.

I Enter (with a Smile)

I first developed relationships with Deaf signers in Nepal in 1997, when I was twenty years old, during an undergraduate semester abroad. A hearing American, I had been studying American Sign Language (ASL) at my home institution for several years. That training had disabused me of many oddly popular and persistent myths, such as the notion of the existence of a single universal sign language. Therefore, after getting settled in Kathmandu, I made inquiries about whether there were any associations of Deaf people in the city that might offer lessons in a local sign language. A friend of one of my Nepali language teachers passed along the address, not far from my homestay in the Naxal neighborhood, of the Kathmandu Association of the Deaf (KAD).

Just past a heavily trafficked intersection, where cars and motorcycles flowed around a tree housing a temple in the middle of the street, I found an alleyway marked by a small blue metal sign bearing the KAD’s logo. The alley opened into a residential courtyard, from which a small white dog came bounding, barking and blocking my way. I was a bit afraid of dogs, so I hesitated, thus encouraging it to growl more aggressively. I considered retreating to the main road and trying my luck another time. However, though the sunny day did not allow me to see through the windows and open door into the relatively dim interior of KAD, I could hear sounds of people interacting within.⁷ Realizing that it was possible that association members inside might observe me being chased away by the dog, I pulled myself together and continued to the entrance (with the dog only feinting at my leg. That dog remained my nemesis for some time). I entered, grinning awkwardly and laughing to mask my embarrassment both at being afraid of the dog and my shyness about entering the KAD without introduction.

Inside it was cool and dim, compared to the hot sunny autumn afternoon. The room was lined with benches and chairs, to the left of the door a desk, and to the right an entry to a private office. About fifteen people were there that day, seated in the chairs circling the room, chatting together in sign language. After a namaste, a gesture of greeting used by most Nepalis, I introduced myself usi...