“Our hands must be connected”: visible gestures, tactile gestures and objects in interactions featuring a deafblind customer in Mumbai

ABSTRACT

This article is based on the analysis of customer interactions of Pradip, a deafblind man, with street sellers and shopkeepers in Mumbai. Pradip made use of visible and tactile gesturing including pointing at and tapping on objects (to indicate them), using emblematic gestures, and tracing the shape of objects on the hand. The fact that the sensory ecology is not reciprocal for the interlocutors is crucial for our understanding of what interaction means in these contexts. The material contexts themselves exert pressure on practices because of the constraints they pose for Pradip and his interlocutors; and routine/patterned ways of interacting in those contexts also exert pressure on practice: conventionalised schemes for customer interactions do not necessarily work in interactions between a deafblind and hearing sighted person. Pradip, as an experienced customer, negotiated the lack of shared conventional mechanisms for coordinating and signalling attention by abundant repetitions and by establishing tactile contact either immediately prior to, or during the utterance, including the production of signs on the interlocutor’s hand. The study thus shows that an experienced customer can successfully initiate new participant frameworks, without naturalising the constraints that are negotiated.

KEYWORDS:

• Multimodality
• pointing
• misunderstanding
• access
• senses
• participant frameworks

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Pradip for his willingness to participate in the study. Thanks to Terra Edwards and Johanna Mesch, and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful and insightful comments on earlier versions of this text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Annelies Kusters has engaged in ethnographic research on deaf lives and sign languages since 2004. She is currently Assistant Professor in Sign Language and Intercultural Studies at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. From 2017 to 2022, she will head the European Research Council-funded MobileDeaf project, undertaken by a deaf research group focusing on international deaf mobilities.

Notes

1. Thanks to Terra Edwards for this insight.

2. Thanks to Terra Edwards for pointing this out.

3. Thanks to Terra Edwards for this insight.

Additional information

Funding

The research on which this article is based was funded by the Department of Socio-Cultural Diversity, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.