Making Sense: Language, Ethics, and Understanding in Deaf Nepal
by E. Mara Green

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.

About the Author

E. Mara Green is an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at Barnard College. As a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist, she advises anthropology and linguistics majors (the latter involves petitioning for a special major, which she is happy to discuss). She has taught courses on anthropological theory, linguistic anthropology, disability, and South Asia, and her work is shaped by deaf, queer, and feminist studies as well. Her work focuses on questions of communication and ethics, asking what it means to understand, and be understood by, others. She is especially interested in how the capacity of people to make meaning together depends as much on a mutual willingness to do so as on shared linguistic resources.

About the Speakers

Severin Fowles is a Professor of Anthropology and American Studies, Chair of Anthropology, and Director of the Archaeology Track at Barnard College. His scholarship combines archaeological methods with perspectives drawn from Critical Indigenous Studies, Art History, Religious Studies, and New Materialist Philosophy to reimagine the history of the American West. He has directed excavations at archaeological sites spanning ten thousand years—from the camps of early foragers, to Ancestral Pueblo villages, to a Spanish colonial plaza community, to a 1960s hippie commune—as well as landscape surveys.

Annelies Kusters currently works at the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies, Heriot-Watt University. She is the first deaf scholar ever to achieve full professor status in the field of deaf studies and sign language studies in the UK. Her research interests include ethnography, anthropology, deaf geographies, Deaf Studies, multilingualism, language strategies, and language ideologies.

Shayoni Mitra is a Senior Lecturer of Theatre at Barnard College and works at the intersection of performance and politics. Her interest in political theatre stems from her years as an actor with Delhi based street theatre group Jana Natya Manch. She is currently revising toward publication her manuscript, “Contesting Capital: A History of Political Theatre in Postcolonial Delhi,” which interrogates the ever shifting, adapting expressions of political theatre under different configurations of power. It is a historical look at both proscenium and street theatre from the decade of Independence in the 1940s to the twenty first century. The manuscript covers a range of styles including folk and revolutionary singing troupes, large open-air performances, topical agit-prop plays, intimate and improvized activist pieces and feminist performances.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University, where she has also been the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Law and Culture. She is also Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective. Povinelli's academic work has focused on developing a critical theory of settler late liberalism and its aftershocks, elaborated across eight monographs and numerous essays.

Please note: American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters will be present to ensure accessibility and inclusivity for Deaf/ Hard of Hearing participants and audience members, and to interpret our deaf panelists for hearing audience members and panelists.

Book cover art by Nanyi Jiang

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