Language in Medical Worlds: Hearing Technology for Deaf Jordanian Children

ABSTRACT

Bringing together medical and linguistic anthropology, I examine the provision of hearing technology, such as cochlear implants, to deaf Jordanian children, a project animated by an imperative to make deaf children speak. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork at a cochlear implantation initiative and an audiology department in Amman, I argue that this imperative must be understood in relation to anxieties about the status of Arabic in Jordan and the historical value of orality in the Middle East. This case shows that more attention must be paid to the role of language ideologies in co-constituting medical encounters between clinicians, parents, and patients.

KEYWORDS:

• Jordan
• cochlear implants
• deafness
• ethopolitics
• language ideologies
• sign language

Acknowledgments

Heartiest thanks go to my interlocutors in Jordan for giving generously of their time and engaging with my questions in the field. This article is a revised version of a paper that won the 2020 Graduate Student Paper Prize from the Middle East Studies Association and received the Honorable Mention for the 2020 Student Paper Award from the Middle East Section. Stefan Helmreich, Michele Friedner, Dwaipayan Banerjee, Graham Jones, Amy Johnson, Amahl Bishara, and Amy Moran-Thomas provided helpful comments and encouragement at every turn. During final edits, I received incisive questions from Reva Dhingra, Kendra Kintzi, Elizabeth Parker-Magyar, Keegan Terek, and students at the Sijal Institute in Amman. Rasha Abu Shakhdam translated the abstract. I thank the editors and three reviewers from Medical Anthropology for pushing me to clarify my argument. This research was approved by COUHES, MIT’s Institutional Review Board.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All names have been changed. I also deliberately avoid naming the hospital and program I worked with.

2. I thank Michele Friedner for this helpful framing and for this particular turn of phrase.

3. Given the short duration of the fieldwork, I recognize the provisional nature of the arguments I make in this article, though I put forth the claims here with some degree of confidence, having lived in Jordan for two years prior to starting the doctoral program and having spent time in deaf communities in Singapore, the United States, and Egypt in addition to Jordan. I hope that I will be able to deepen and extend my analysis after completing dissertation fieldwork.

4. In deaf studies, there has been a tradition of using “deaf” to refer to those with a physical condition of hearing loss and “Deaf” to refer to those with a cultural and linguistic identity centered around sign language. In this article I use “deaf” to encompass both physiological and sociocultural connotations so as not to circumscribe the experience of deaf people in the Middle East with that of North America and Western Europe (cf. Scalenghe 2014:8).

5. There are at least two other devices that fall somewhere on this spectrum: bone conductive implants, for which deaf Jordanians could technically qualify; and auditory brainstem implants, which an audiologist told me are not used in Jordan because they are considered “dangerous,” since the implant is placed directly on the brainstem rather than in the cochlea (as with the cochlear implant). During my fieldwork, neither of these cases came up, and it was clear that hearing aids and cochlear implants were the dominant technologies in the hospital.

6. I thank Marah Sarji for help with translating the Arabic videos, although any translation errors remain mine.

7. I acknowledge that Nikolas Rose himself formulated these concepts in the context of “advanced liberal democracies” (2001:18) and perhaps did not intend for them to be applied elsewhere.

8. In fact, Jordan has signed and ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which promotes the use of sign languages. To me, what this points to is a tension between a right to medical care and a right to accessible language. See also Friedner (2018) for an explanation of the trope of “oral failures.”

9. For an introduction to sign language ideologies from a sociolinguistic perspective, see Hill (2013). Sign language ideologies in various contexts around the globe is also the subject of a recent volume edited by Kusters et al. (2020).

10. I want to caveat that the concern over losing Arabic to English is a classed issue in Jordan – for the purposes of this article, suffice it to say that the issue is generally more salient among Jordanians of a higher socioeconomic status.

11. Qur’an 12:2, trans. Sahih International. ʿaql here is the opposite of jahl, referring to al-jahiliyya, or pre-Islamic Arabia. The implication is that people come to know Allah through the Qur’an.

12. This article has focused primarily on the views of the hearing audiologists with whom I conducted fieldwork. In my dissertation research, I hope to explore the issues I have raised here from the perspectives of deaf Jordanians, which are likely different from those of hearing Jordanians (cf. Kusters et al. 2020).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Timothy Y. Loh

Timothy Y. Loh is a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS). His ethnographic research examines sociality, language, and religion in deaf and signing worlds spanning Jordan, Singapore, and the United States. https://www.timothyyloh.com.