“Deaf Discourse”: The Social Construction of Deafness in a Bedouin Community

Abstract

Among the Al-Sayyid Arab-Bedouin, the use of an indigenous sign language is widespread and provides the foundation of a signing community shared by hearing and deaf people. Cases with comparable high incidences of deafness have in recent years stimulated debates in diverse academic disciplines. Lacking an accurate term, they are regularly referred to as “Martha's Vineyard situations” and have often been oversimplified and romanticized. This article provides an in-depth analysis of a Bedouin shared-signing community and advocates closer investigation of both facilitating and disabling social practices, which would also allow better examination of comparable cases. This article concentrates on the shared use of sign language, the asymmetry it entails, and the manifold forms of translation and mediation that take place. Whereas most hearing Al-Sayyid persons have access to both spoken and signed modes of communication, deaf people's communication remains largely restricted to the signed mode (hence, the asymmetry). However, in contrast to the common reduction of deafness to the disabling absence of speech or need for translation, deaf people's need for translation is not unusual among the Al-Sayyid; local communication patterns involve many different forms of translation between different spoken languages, written languages, discourses, and social domains. Additionally, ample translators are readily available. Moreover, the common familiarity with deaf people and sign language facilitates the production and sharing of a unique experiential knowledge, grounded in daily experiences and practices. In this context, deafness is not easily subjugated to its medical model. However, encounters with the medical and educational establishment present a series of challenges that may severely exacerbate deaf people's structure of opportunities. Finally, I consider the attempts made so far to classify comparable cases; unfortunately, these mostly attempt to classify deaf communities rather than the broader category of signing communities. I thus maintain that the term “shared signing community” most accurately captures what these cases have in common: the pervasive use of signing by both hearing and deaf.

Keywords:

• Bedouin
• deafness
• disablement
• shared signing community
• translation and mediation

Notes

To conceal people's identities, personal details have been slightly altered and pseudonyms are used for all individuals.

In my unpublished Master's thesis (Kisch 2000) and in Kisch (2004), I have used the pseudonym Abu-Shara for the descent group's name. However, Sandler et al. (2005) have revealed the actual name while they among others refer to my work; consequently, I have ceased to use this pseudonym.

I here draw on the common extension of Hymes' (1974) definition of speech community. The term was originally designed to contrast with the written mode of language. However, it can be appropriately extended to the signed mode (Senghas & Monaghan 2002).

At least one of Sandler et al.'s (2005) informants, who they consider second-generation signers, is bilingual, and the remaining have either siblings or children who are users of ISL. Although this would only strengthen their findings concerning the independence of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, their failure to mention these contacts results in misleading impressions such as in Senghas's (2005:464) statement that ISL is not used locally. I have in the past presented my reservations concerning the portrayal of the Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language as isolated, by indicating various forms of language contact, such as common bilingualism among deaf signers, lexical borrowing, and the existence of regional dialects or accent differentiation (Kisch 2006).

e.g., Israel High Court of Justice (HCJ), 2000, verdict #4540, HCJ, 2001 verdict #3586 and HCJ, 2004 verdict#786.

The precise number of cases of profound early onset nonsyndromic hearing loss in Israel is unknown but it is expected to be approximately 1 in 1,000 children. This rate is higher among the Arab–Palestinian population due to consanguinity in Arab villages (Jaber et al. 1998). Shahin et al. (2002) established that prelingual hereditary hearing impairment occurs in the Palestinian population at a frequency of approximately 1.7 per 1,000.

The estimate made by Sandler et al. 2005 is rather overstated; Al-Sayyid deaf descendants in all generations would hardly reach 150. It seems this overestimation is related to inadequacies in their genealogical recording.

When signing Arabic, the structure and concepts of spoken Arabic are maintained, but words are accompanied or replaced by signs borrowed from the lexicon of a sign language. This would be the case for any manual coding of spoken language; comparably in the United States, signed English normally draws signs from American Sign Language.

Most genetic mutations responsible for deafness are recessive. Therefore, 90 percent of deaf children are born into hearing families (Lane et al. 1996).

“The medical model of deafness is one based on deficit theory and holds that deafness is the pathological absence of hearing and that such a hearing-impaired individual is therefore disabled because of faulty hearing” (Senghas & Monaghan 2002:77). The medical models of deafness are a major source of perceptions and practices disabling deaf people.

Before that, very few children received a formal education; mostly sons of Sheikh's were sent to Ottoman or British mandatory schools (Abu-Saad 1997).

After Israel's occupation of the West Bank following the 1967 war, contacts with its Palestinian population were resumed.

This was a school with a strong oralist (vs. sign) policy. Nevertheless, it seems that during the time the Al-Sayyid siblings spent there, they were exposed to LIU, a version of which was most likely used among some of the deaf students. However, since both children and parents were unhappy with the distance from home, this arrangement did not last long.

By the time I started this research, my command of Arabic was a rather awkward blend of the formal (classical) Arabic because I had only studied years previously in high school, and the various Palestinian and Egyptian spoken dialects I had been exposed to or used in the years since.

Exposure to English began during the British mandate period. Today it is studied at school, broadly introduced by television, and is often related to consumption (such as labels of products and instructions of equipment).

Exposure to LIU has become widespread since the introduction of electric generators and satellite television. This has made it possible to watch Jordanian channels in which quite a number of programs are broadcast with simultaneous translation to LIU.

I borrow here from Louis Dumont (1980) who uses the term dialectical hierarchy; although his concern is more conceptual, he also uses gender to demonstrate dialectical hierarchies.

Women often assumed the status of non-participant and silent observers of men's gatherings when they engage in tasks such as serving them tea or food. An elaborate illustration of the separate social worlds of Bedouin men and women can be found in Abu-Lughod (1988, 1985).

For several years, a single Arabic-speaking teacher was employed, part-time, to introduce the students to Arabic language.

Signed Hebrew is Hebrew accompanied or coded by signs (borrowed from ISL).

This also meant that its curriculum did not meet the standard academic level.

Arabic is a diglossic language; i.e., it exhibits a strict distribution of formal vs. informal usage (Ferguson 1996). These different registers are often considered to establish bilingualism.

Goffman (1963) introduced the terms in-group and out-group alignments.

Given the recessive deafness among the Al-Sayid, it indeed displays a generally scattered pattern. Only four deaf parents have deaf children, all have hearing partners and both deaf and hearing children. Two of these deaf parents create a generational depth of three successive generations of deafness; a deaf grandfather who has deaf and hearing children; one of his deaf sons has deaf children as well. These cases then, display a pattern similar to dominant deafness. Persistent intermarriage will increase the occurrence of such generational continuity.

The three dimensions suggested by Woll and Ladd (2003) are: the axis of attitudes to deaf people, the size of the deaf population, and the life choices available for deaf people.

Woll and Ladd's (2003) reference to my earlier work on the Bedouin case includes several inaccuracies. In contrast to their indications, deaf Bedouin children are not better educated than their hearing peers, Al-Sayyid deaf women are not exclusively married as second wives, and in Kisch (2000), I provide different demographic data and avoid the term tribe in reference to Al-Sayyid.

e.g., Woodward (2003) refers to the ways in which “Deaf and hearing people in Ban Khor have chosen to respond” to the high incidence of deafness (2003:290).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shifra Kisch

SHIFRA KISCH is a doctoral candidate at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research of the Universitet van Amsterdam and instructor at the University College Utrecht. As an anthropologist, she has a variety of research interests, including medical anthropology, linguistic anthropology, science and technology studies, deaf and disability studies, and gender studies. She received her M.A. Cum Laude from Tel Aviv University, where she also taught medical anthropology. In an earlier study, she explored lay-encounters between Bedouin and Jewish women in an Israeli hospital. She is currently completing her dissertation on gender and deafness among the Negev Bedouin.