Deaf culture

Deaf community and Deaf culture are two phrases used to refer to persons who are culturally Deaf as opposed to those who are deaf from the medical/audiological/pathological perspective. When used in the cultural sense, the word deaf is very often capitalized.

Background

Being unable to hear is only a part of being Deaf. In fact, when the word is used in the cultural sense, hearing is one of the least important criteria used to delineate group membership. Many persons that are labeled hearing or hard-of-hearing from the medical perspective are labeled or would label themselves as Deaf from the cultural perspective. Similarly, a person who self-identifies as Deaf may in fact have much more hearing than one who self-identifies as either hearing or hard-of-hearing. The use of the cultural label is a declaration of personal identity much more than an explanation of hearing ability.

For the above reason, culturally Deaf people do not look on deafness as a disability. Deaf people view deafness as an asset in much the same way it is an asset to be a Navajo within the Navajo tribe or to be a Korean within the community of Koreans in Los Angeles. It is a manner of viewing the world and a matter of semantics. Most Deaf see deafness as the norm and thus do not see hearing as something they lack or envy, even though the significant majority of the population has moderate to profound hearing loss. One would not define Navajos or Koreans as lacking the ability to be something other than Navajo or Korean. They, and the culturally Deaf, define themselves by what they are instead of what they are not. They consider what they are to be a positive trait, because it is tightly connected to their culture.

As an example of how thoroughly deafness is seen as a positive attribute, many Deaf individuals wish for their children to be born deaf. This can be hard or even impossible for hearing people to understand, but there is an explanation for this when one considers how difficult it can be for hearing parents to raise deaf children: It can be equally difficult for deaf parents to raise hearing children. Both hearing and deaf parents who have children unlike them understand how much simpler life is when they fully understand the needs of their children and can easily communicate with and relate to their child's experience in the world. As hearing parents seek out resources to help them in the nurturing and education of their deaf children so too must deaf parents take extraordinary steps to ensure their hearing children, whose mother tongue might be a sign language, are exposed to hearing people and culture. Furthermore, Deaf parents know firsthand that Deaf people are able to live productive, fulfilling, and rewarding lives. So, taking all this into consideration, it comes as no surprise that as with hearing parents, some deaf parents see their own abilities and skills best utilized on children who cannot hear. Over the centuries, some deaf families have learned how to compensate in ways to overcome common obstacles and share the knowledge via storytelling in sign language.

Those who view deafness as a disability — known as a pathological perspective of deafness — can be met with hostility by some individuals in the Deaf community. Such hostility may represent a reaction to the suspicion and hostility that many deaf people encounter during their lives at the hands of the hearing.

People without hearing loss can and do participate in the Deaf community. For example, hearing children of deaf adults (commonly called "CODAs") can experience full acceptance within the Deaf-World, a term some Deaf Americans use to describe their social network. Acceptance into this world may extend to anyone who appreciates the aesthically pleasing flow of signed communication within the group and upholds the values, history, mores, and dignity of deaf people. Other people who are often accepted as full or partial members of Deaf culture are sign language interpreters, family members, and service professionals who help Deaf individuals.

Validity as a culture

Culture is expressed by the interrelated and interdependent characteristics, behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, values, mores, history, and, typically, language of a group. The determination of one's membership in a particular cultural group is not determined by vote or election by its constituent members, but by individual choice to embrace the core values of the group. In this regard, the community of Deaf people, because they have a language and history that binds them, have the conceptual framework to be viewed as a culture. Well known cultural groups such as women, gays and lesbians, African-Americans and indigenous peoples such as the Inuit tribe of Alaska represent minority cultures that are embedded within a larger majority. Each group has culturally devised behaviors, beliefs and values that serve as markers for who does or does not embrace the general worldview of the group. When comparing the community of Deaf people with these groups, the commonalities are consistent between them all. In one respect, minority cultures can be described as groups which are bound together because they are disadvantaged by the beliefs and practices of the majority culture in which they are embedded. This is true of language minorities such as Deaf people and Hispanic-Americans, ethnic and racial minorities such as Turkish Armenians, religious minorities such as Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses, and sexual minorities such as gays and lesbians.

Group attributes

As with any other culture, there exists a set of shared experiences, attitudes and cultural norms that serve to identify and bring together members of the Deaf community while simultaneously excluding outsiders from the group. To be fully included in the Deaf community, one must at least have the following attributes and possibly others not mentioned.

Fluency in a sign language and a positive attitude toward the language. Sign language is the centralmost valued aspect of Deaf culture and having a shared language sets up a powerful affinity among the Deaf as it does in hearing cultures. Language is often a central, indeed required, component of a culture. In hearing cultures foreigners are expected to learn the language of the land of their residence in order to successfully assimilate into the culture. Use of the majority language is desirable, but the grave difficulty of acquiring spoken language for the prelingually deaf has been balanced by the community's genius in creating original, indigenous sign languages that are truly "of" the nation that nurtures the signing deaf as citizens, embodying both their national culture and the culture of the deaf community itself.
Knowledge and respect for the cultural norms of the Deaf community. For example, the Deaf community has attention-getting behaviors: waving a hand or creating a vibration with an object to gain attention; pointing at people is not considered rude behavior. Direct eye contact is insisted on to glean meaning. There are Deaf culture norms for introductions and leave-taking, which are prolonged and physical with much contact. Deaf people additionally follow many of the cultural norms of group-oriented cultures. The accomplishments of the individual are viewed from the perspective of a group accomplishment. Since most Deaf people are born to hearing parents (9 out of 10 people deaf from birth are born to hearing parents), persons who identify themselves as Deaf tend to view the Deaf community as a family unit rather than the biological family unit; Deaf people cherish their language, and many hearing parents do not learn enough ASL to achieve fluency. Some other cultural norms are different from those of the hearing culture within which Deaf culture is embedded.
Adaptations to deafness. Deafness may present both liabilities and assets in the interaction of the Deaf with the surrounding world. While one cannot attract the attention of a deaf person by calling their name, deaf people can communicate freely where ambient noise prohibits communication, or even comfort, among the hearing. This is one reason deaf people are highly sought after as employees in large-scale manufacturing and publishing where the noise of machinery is a serious concern. Two people skilled in sign language can converse through a closed window or glass office wall, or across a space too large for a voice to carry, as long as they can see one another. Another good example is being able to talk underwater while scuba diving.
Many Deaf do not see themselves as disabled. A hearing person may not understand why some deaf people express no sense of loss over being unable to experience sound. Since experiencing sound is something some deaf people never had, there may be no loss or associated emotions with not having it. Deaf people are aware of the things they cannot succeed in and may be adept at ferreting out the range of activities in which they can occupy or create an established niche. This may seem unusual to some hearing people because they are aware of the abundance of opportunities afforded to people who hear sounds. Hearing persons who are members of the Deaf community are aware of and share this Deaf-World view not so much because they are expected to, but because they have witnessed (or participated in) the common-sense practicality of deaf methods of problem solving.

Mainstream recognition of Deaf culture

For much of history, deaf people were expected to adapt to hearing culture as best they were able or to be hidden or invisible. Recently, especially in the United States and the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland), the existence of a Deaf culture have been increasingly recognized.

Deaf President Now: The 1988 student strike at Gallaudet University was a watershed moment in the awareness of Deaf culture by the dominant American hearing culture. DPN student organizers and allies forced the university, which, after all, served an all-deaf and hearing-impaired population, to select its first deaf president. Perhaps more importantly, the movement helped frame the struggle of deaf people within the context of a civil rights movement. Indeed, for Deaf people, language is an essential, basic civil right that has been denied to them many times throughout history. Having a leader who can fully understand and relate to this principal was considered vital to the Deaf population.

Also in the UK a charity called the Dorothy Miles Cultural Centre (DMCC), based in Guildford, exists to bridge the gap between deaf and hearing people through social, cultural and educational activities. The Centre also offers courses in British Sign Language (BSL) which are accredited by the Council for the Advancement of Communication with Deaf People (CACDP). DMCC runs drama workshops involving professional actors and organises sporting events, including an annual cricket match. There is also widespread availability of BSL courses from other providers across the UK. Nearly all terrestrial television is closed captioned.

In the spring, 2006,The Deaf Culture Centre will open at the historic culture, arts and entertainment Distillery District in the heart of Old Town Toronto . A project of the Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf, it will feature a museum, art gallery, gift shop, research and archives, state-of-the-art visually rich technology highlighting Deaf historical artifacts, literature, ASL/LSQ interactive website/television and multimedia production studio.

Books

Padden, Carol and Humphries, Tom (1988). Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lane, Harlan, Hoffmeister, Robert, and Bahan, Ben (1996). A Journey into the Deaf-World. San Diego, CA: Dawn Sign Press.
Van Cleve, John Vickrey and Crouch, Barry A., A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America, 1989, ISBN 0930323491.
Raymond Luczak, Eyes of Desire: A Deaf Gay & Lesbian Reader, 1993, ISBN 1555832040.
Carol A. Padden, Tom L. Humphries, Inside Deaf Culture, 2005, ISBN 0674015061.
Padden, Carol (1996). From the cultural to the bicultural: the modern Deaf community. in Parasnis I, ed. 1996. "Cultural and Language Diversity and the Deaf Experience." Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press
Oliver W. Sacks, Seeing Voices; A Journey Into The World Of The Deaf, 1989, ISBN 0520060830.
Pizzo, Rose, "Growing Up Deaf: Issues of Communication in a Hearing World", 2001, ISBN 1-4010-2887-X

External Links

ASL and Deaf Culture Resource Site Free online library of articles related to Deaf Culture and American Sign Language.
A DeafWiki free-content encyclopedia of deaf and hard hearing
BID Services with Deaf People

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