https://www.ucpress.edu/books/making-sense/paper

Timothy Loh: Thank you so much for this wonderful and incisive book! It’s such an exciting contribution not only to deaf anthropology and sign language studies but also to the broader study of how language makes personhood and sociality. I was particularly moved by your concluding story about how one of your interlocutors, Parvati, was “made to make sense” through the weaving together of partial understanding(s). One of the main thrusts of this book is how a willingness to understand is a necessary (if insufficient) component in the project of communicative sociality, especially for natural sign in which grammar cannot be relied upon to ground understanding (and I see this also in your previous work on International Sign). Can you say more about the stakes of this idea?

Mara Green: Thank you for these generous and thoughtful questions! Yes, one of the main arguments of the book is that willingness to understand is necessary, particularly in cases of emergent language practices, because such practices by definition do not involve the robust, symmetrically shared grammatical resources offered by conventional language(s). I appreciate the opportunity to say a bit more about this and also to think across my work on natural sign in Nepal and on International Sign (IS).

Before I get to natural sign and International Sign language, I want to emphasize that one of the reasons conventional grammatical systems are so powerful is that they obviate much of the need for willingness – or at least, some of the need, in some circumstances, and for some people, to be a little bit, albeit imprecisely, Peircian about it. When I’m listening to someone speak English, or watching someone sign NSL, for some level of referential understanding, my willingness becomes backgrounded, and perhaps even unnecessary. I can even pay only partial attention. I’m also thinking about how I live in New York City, on a loud street, and the kinds of spoken communication I hear even when I’d rather not –  that is to say, the materiality of different communicative media or modalities, such as speech and sign, also matter here. I think about these aspects – of conventionality and materiality – as more or less interpellative, depending on circumstances.

The capacity to background willingness also produces its own important effects within everyday sociality. This is why deaf NSL signers care so much about NSL, and the networks it mediates, creates, and is reproduced by. Certain forms of political and social life become possible when conventional language is available. On page 20, I write about how seductive conventional language can be; this property is related but not identical to the interpellative quality of conventional language. Together, I think these dimensions go a long way toward explaining why – as so many activists and researchers have shown – deaf signers value sign-centered spaces. Terra Edwards’ recent book Going Tactile explores the value of this kind of shared language in the context of DeafBlind signers.

At the same time, it has become so apparent to me, across many years and the different sites where I’ve been really privileged to engage in fieldwork, that conventional language isn’t necessarily necessary for communication that is referentially (along with socially, emotionally, and so on) meaningful. I would be fascinated to be proven wrong, but it seems that gesture, visual signing, and protactile languaging here have a real advantage over speech (by which I mean speech on its own, which is actually not how many, many people use speech, as gesture researchers have shown). Work by people like Adam Kendon, Charles Goodwin, Annelies Kusters, Terra Edwards, and many others shows how gestures, signs, and protactile resources articulate with what in the book I call the sociomaterial world. To make sense of how people materialize this convergence, I argue that signs are immanent in this world and can be brought forth through the movement of the body for the purpose of semiosis. So these modalities or channels offer opportunities for representation and reference, even when linguistic conventions are less abundant than in conventional language situations. For example, even if there’s not a conventional sign for something like marriage, you could point to where someone would wear a ring or necklace that marks being married.

To address my previous research: I think it’s helpful to mark two primary differences between International Sign and natural sign. First, in the situations where I have experienced IS, signers in their everyday lives are using at least one, and often many more than one, conventional language (signed, written, and/or spoken). In the situations where I have experienced natural sign, there are times when everyone involved also uses a conventional language – for example, when a hearing person who is fluent in Nepali and a deaf person who is fluent in NSL are communicating. But, as the book lays out, natural sign is the primary communicative mode for many deaf Nepalis (some of whom also use speech, to varying degrees). I think there’s a key difference between moving between conventional and emergent language and living primarily or entirely in the latter, and this is related not just to the communicative resources one has, but also the kinds of communicative socialities one inhabits. My argument is that for people who don’t have another horizon, the stakes are especially high.

The second important difference is distribution of willingness. Simply put, in the IS settings I’ve been in, most everyone is willing, and often super excited, to do the work of what, in the article you linked, I call linguistic commensuration – making meaning across language differences. In the natural sign settings I’ve been in, some people are invested, some people are not, and some people sometimes are. Perhaps it’s ironic that in the higher stakes situations, in a sense, there’s less guarantee of willingness, but maybe it’s not ironic, in that that’s exactly what produces these higher stakes, both in particular interactions and over time, as understandings, misunderstandings, and not-understandings accrue.

Timothy Loh: Some of the arguments you make in this book really go to the heart of linguistic anthropology. You urge anthropologists not to dismiss referentiality too quickly or to assume its presence, and to think about the relationship between semiotics and ethics, the line between which is blurred for natural sign users (p. 116). How do you hope your book will be taken up by linguistic anthropologists—and other scholars?

Mara Green: I remember attending a talk during graduate school – admittedly not a linguistic anthropology or even sociocultural anthropology event – where someone used a referentially rich and syntactically complex sentence to insist that signifier and signified had become detached. And I remember thinking, “But I just understood you!” I was very pleased to get to make this argument in print.

Now, one could argue that the referents of the words signifier and signified in that person’s talk and in my work are different, and maybe that’s the case. Regardless, I think it’s easy for people to take language for granted. And to be clear, I think people should have access to settings where they can take language for granted (as I write below) – but I also think that it’s important to call attention to this taken for grantedness and to its social, political, and theoretical consequences.

On the theoretical level, I hope that linguistic anthropologists, but also other scholars who are concerned with language, language use, and semiotics (and I’d venture to say that’s a vast majority of social science and humanities scholars), will ask themselves, “On what ground am I making claims about the relative non-centrality of reference?” I think that going beyond reference is exciting, important, and one of the great contributions of linguistic anthropology and allied fields. And it can be easy to presume that something is peripheral, rather than foundational (albeit not the focus of your argument), if it’s something you, and the people with whom you work, get to take for granted on an everyday and analytic basis.

In my everyday life, as in this written interview, I can take reference for granted (usually – I’ve been thinking more and more about how misunderstandings may sometimes rest on assumptions of shared reference that under scrutiny are revealed as not-so-fully-shared). But, many people I’ve worked with over the years can’t. In spending time with these interlocutors – trying to make plans, have a conversation, or ascertain a detail in natural sign, or, in the case of talking with NSL signers, attending to their stories about what their lives outside of NSL were and are like – and in writing the book (especially the transcriptions!), I have come to realize how important it is to recognize when something can be moved beyond precisely because it is so robustly present.

Even beyond linguistic anthropologists and other scholars, I hope that the book can be taken up by and of use to people, in Nepal and elsewhere, who are trying to wrest resources from states and other centers of power for the purposes of cultivating spaces where more and more people can take reference, language, and communicative sociality for granted. In case that isn’t clear: fund deaf schools and organizations and prioritize hiring deaf teachers, staff, and administration!

Timothy Loh: Your book tackles these large questions and/but is based on deep ethnographic fieldwork in Maunabudhuk and Bodhe. I was wondering to what extent it matters that the phenomenon you are studying is happening in Nepal? In other words, what is Nepalese about this story?

Mara Green: This is a great question, and one that is tricky to answer because it’s not a comparative project, but a few things come to mind. First, I want to mention how the generosity of people with whom I worked in Maunabudhuk, Bodhe, Kathmandu, and elsewhere feels very Nepali to me. People were generally willing to spend time with me, answer my awkward questions, try to understand my foreign accent, let me videotape them, etc. and they did this frequently and with good humor – and fed me to boot. So the kinds of access to settings that I had were enabled by particular, Nepali (if not exclusive to Nepali people) orientations toward hospitality and conversation.

The second way I’d answer this question is to think about communicative practice and habit. In the book, I cite Mike Morgan’s notion of “gesture prone” places, and I’ve had conversations with other friends, both deaf and hearing, about the kinds of responses that hearing people have when they realize someone is deaf, in, say, North America or South Asia. Obviously this is a generalization, but the consensus is that in the former, hearing nonsigners panic, or yell very loudly, or maybe try to find paper and pencil. In South Asia, very frequently, people are willing to use their hands. Further research would be needed to think across places and the different kinds of habits people produce and inherit. Is this South Asian pattern due to broader linguistic diversity, with (hearing) people being used to making meaning across differences in spoken languages? Is it because of higher overall percentages of deaf people within any given setting? Something else?

It’s also important to mention how this book is about a particular time in Nepal. Through the course of my fieldwork, I’ve met many deaf people who grew up before deaf schools were established – either in Nepal at all, or in their area –  and thus didn’t grow up signing NSL. As I say in the book, I’m not predicting an end to natural sign as more and more deaf children grow up going to schools with other NSL signers, but I do think that natural sign will shift, as it becomes the primary communicative mode for fewer people.

Timothy Loh: I was really struck by the paradoxes and contradictions that you present in this book: that natural sign is “perfectly adequate” and enables communication “with a broader range of people than [Nepali Sign Language]” yet “[imposes] limits on communication” (p. 36); that it is “often easy and often difficult” (p. 82); and so on. These can be understood as language ideologies, though it seems you chose to background that framework in this book. You also do so much in this book: using graphics, tracking eye gaze, and so on. I’d love to hear more about the process of writing this book, especially in terms of thinking about the multiple modalities involved.

Mara Green: I’m frequently telling my students to pay attention to tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions, so I’m glad that I have followed my own advice.

You’re right that I background the framework of language ideologies, and that’s despite having had the opportunity to co-edit a volume on sign language ideologies with Annelies Kusters, Erin Moriarty, and Kristin Snoddon. One of the arguments we make in the introduction to the book – an argument that is unlikely to surprise readers of this blog – is that language ideologies isn’t a synonym for (other people’s) incorrect ideas, and that scholarly as well as local theories of language are ideological. Given that invocation, this next move may be surprising: I actually want to emphasize a distinction between claims I’m making about what other people say (for example, that natural sign is in some situations perfectly adequate but also limiting) and other kinds of claims (such as: that I have witnessed communication in natural sign that appears fluid as well as halting, that I’ve experienced this myself). This distinction is not because what other people say is ideology and what I say is fact, of course, but because I want to be clear that NSL signers’ claims about natural sign are ethnographic and theoretical as well as ideological, just as my own claims are (inevitably) ideological as well as ethnographic and theoretical.

More broadly, I found that thinking through questions of orientation and practice was a productive way into the entanglement of what people say about what they do and what they do, including the ways people contradict themselves, for example, by saying “I don’t understand” in speech but responding in sign, or the ways they make their own predictions/evaluations come true, for example, by saying “I don’t understand” in speech and looking away from a signer. Going back to the previous question about semiotics and ethics, trying to track people’s ideas about signing, their relationship with a specific person, the actual unfolding of a conversation across modalities, and the ways that these different threads reinforce, contradict, and complicate each other, helped me to recognize and articulate the blurriness of the semiotics-ethics line, whereas (at least for me) the concept of linguistic ideology might have made it seem very stark.

I will say that I never thought I’d be a person who did frame by frame analysis or tracked something like eye gaze. But that’s where the material brought me. Perhaps that is part of what you’re asking about, both in this and the following question. I think one of the great privileges – and contributions – of anthropology (and I’m thinking about Lynnette Arnold’s interview here on CaMP, which I was just reading, and Diego Arispe-Bazán’s question about ethnographic intimacy), is the way it compels us. The number of times I saw people’s eyes move away from a signer, or glaze over, was unignorable. I was lucky to have an extended example (analyzed in Chapter 4) where that was clearly captured on video, since often such conversational moves were fleeting and in situations where I wasn’t filming.

This brings us to your question about modalities. Even within the textuality of the book, there are multiple ways I tried to represent communicative practices: glossing a sign in English or Nepali, describing a sign’s handshapes and movements, offering a translation of spoken Nepali, with or without a transcription of it. From my earliest presentations of this work, I’ve found video – and for publications, freeze frames or sketches – to be really helpful for getting across both some of the details of interaction and some of the arguments I’m making about it. Whether for video or still images, there’s a question of selection – what exactly do I want to show? This was most apparent to me when working with artist Nanyi Jiang. It was such a fun and generative process to show her a freeze frame, or occasionally a photograph or a short video clip, and discuss what dimensions she should focus on in creating the line drawings that appear on the cover and in the book.

There is a risk with video in particular that people will think that what you’re arguing, what they’re seeing, or even signing itself as a linguistic modality, are self-evident. But the benefit, which for me has outweighed the risks, is that there’s at least some possibility of showing and not just telling (I’m thinking here again with Terra Edwards’ book). I hope that having images offers readers a kind of possibility for understanding that is different from what text alone can offer. And as I say in the introduction, specific ways of representing sign and speech will resonate differently with different readers.

I also want to mention that I’m not 100% happy with all of my choices. Using a slash mark between ALL-CAPS SIGN/italicized speech or using symbols like ### to mean “signs that I do not know how to gloss” leaves some elegance to be desired. And my use of transcripts and drawings both facilitates and creates barriers to access, in different ways for different readers, in ways I’m still thinking through – and here I’m grateful to be in conversation with friends and colleagues.