Michele Friedner

Sounding the limits of life : essays in the anthropology of biology and beyond

List of Illustrations vii Sounding Life, Water, Sound ix CHAPTER 1 What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies 1 CHAPTER 2 Life Forms: A Keyword Entry (with Sophia Roosth) 19 CHAPTER 3 An Archaeology of Artificial Life, Underwater 35 CHAPTER 4 Cetology Now: Formatting the Twenty-First-Century Whale 44 CHAPTER 5 How Like a Reef: Figuring Coral, 1839-2010 48 CHAPTER 6 Homo microbis: Species, Race, Sex, and the Human Microbiome 62 CHAPTER 7 The Signature of Life: Designing the Astrobiological Imagination 73 CHAPTER 8 Nature/Culture/Seawater: Theory Machines, Anthropology, Oceanization 94 CHAPTER 9 Time and the Tsunami: Indian Ocean, 2004 106 CHAPTER 10 From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures 116 CHAPTER 11 Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science 137 CHAPTER 12 Seashell Sound 155 CHAPTER 13 Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies (with Michele Friedner) 164 CHAPTER 14 Chimeric Sensing 173 Life, Water, Sound Resounding 183 Acknowledgments 189 Notes 195 Index 283

Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies

ABSTRACT Sound studies and Deaf studies may seem at first impression to operate in worlds apart. We argue in this article, however, that similar renderings of hearing, deafness, and seeing as ideal types—and as often essentialized sensory modes—make it possible to read differences between Sound studies and Deaf studies as sites of possible articulation. We direct attention to four zones of productive overlap, attending to how sound is inferred in deaf and Deaf practice, how reimagining sound in the register of low-frequency vibration can upend deafhearing dichotomies, how “deaf futurists” champion cyborg sound, and how signing and other non-spoken communicative practices might undo phonocentric models of speech. Sound studies and Deaf studies emerge as fields with much to offer one another epistemologically, theoretically, and practically.

Deaf bodies and corporate bodies: new regimes of value in Bangalore's business process outsourcing sector

This article ethnographically analyses how groups (and not just individuals) are produced in business process outsourcing (BPO) workplaces. In order to mitigate an unstable labour pool, corporations hire deaf workers to perform identical BPO work regardless of their qualifications and backgrounds. These hiring practices serve to cement existing relationships and produce deaf workers as a group marked only by deafness. This article explores how engaging in the same work articulates with deaf young adults’ ‘sameness work’ to produce ambivalent deaf groups. It also analyses the everyday practices of deaf employees, their relationships with their normal co-workers who ‘love’ them, and the ways that value is reconfigured in the workplace through the existence of disabled workers. This article argues that in contrast to dominant representations of disabled people as unemployable, the (re)inscription of deafness as a source of multiple forms of value begs for a broader analysis of the role of disability in late capitalism. Corps sourds et corporations : nouveaux regimes de valeur dans le secteur de la sous-traitance des processus d’entreprise a Bangalore Resume L’article expose une analyse ethnographique de la facon dont les lieux de travail ou s’exerce la sous-traitance des processus d’entreprise produisent des groupes (et pas seulement des individus). Afin de limiter l’instabilite de la main-d’œuvre, les entreprises embauchent des sourds pour realiser le meme travail de sous-traitance des processus d’entreprise, sans egard pour leurs qualifications ou leurs antecedents. Ces pratiques d’embauche servent a cimenter les relations existantes et a produire des travailleurs sourds, constituant un groupe caracterise uniquement par sa surdite. Le present article examine la maniere dont la realisation du meme travail s’articule avec le « travail sur les similitudes » des jeunes adultes sourds pour produire des groupes sourds ambivalents. Il analyse en outre les pratiques quotidiennes des employes sourds, leurs relations avec leurs collegues normaux qui « les aiment » et les manieres dont cette valeur est reconfiguree sur le lieu de travail par l’existence de travailleurs handicapes. L’auteure avance que par rapport aux representations dominantes des handicapes comme inaptes au travail, la (re)inscription de la surdite comme source de multiples formes de valeur appelle une analyse plus vaste du role du handicap dans le capitalisme tardif.

Identity Formation and Transnational Discourses

This article is an attempt to explore the role, if any, that transnational deaf identity politics plays within the lives of members of the Delhi Foundation of Deaf Women (DFDW). Taking a two-pronged ethnographic and historical approach, I will examine how the DFDW came to exist, situating it within the field of organisations serving the deaf in Delhi, as well as providing an overview of its structure and client profile. I will also examine the terrain of identity politics within the deaf community of the DFDW, and ask questions about what identity, deafness and kinship mean to its members. Most theory coming out of Deaf studies has ignored, until relatively recently, the category of gender. This article seeks to explore how culture and gender modify the constructions and experiences of Deaf identity.

Deaf studies meets autistic studies

Abstract What might deaf studies and autistic studies have in common? Why, in many cases, is deafness considered to be a norm to be analyzed through linguistic and cultural frameworks, while autism is (still) seen as pathological? Utilizing ethnographic research, participation in two conferences on autism and sign language, and an analysis of deaf peoples’ and autistic peoples’ self-(re)presentation, we attend to sensory solidarities that might exist between deaf and autistic people, communities, and studies. We argue that an analysis of the two fields side-by-side offers important insights into new ways of conceptualizing sociality, identity, and community both in the specific cases of deafness and autism, and more broadly. Additionally, attending to deaf and autistic peoples’ language and communication desires and practices opens up analytic and empirical space for considering interdependent and multimodal communicative approaches.

How the disabled body unites the national body: disability as ‘feel good’ diversity in urban India

This article analyzes both representations of disability in popular media and the role of disabled workers in urban India and demonstrates how the category of disability becomes a form of non-threatening ‘feel good’ diversity. Unlike other axes of difference such as class, caste, gender, sexuality, and religion, India’s disability rights movement, corporations, and mainstream media represent disability as largely apolitical. Drawing on Nehruvian ideals about ‘unity in diversity’, this article discusses how disability functions as a means of imagining and creating unity in India. As a result of skillful manipulation that collapses and conflates nationalist and neoliberal projects, the success of disabled people is considered to be synonymous with the success of the nation. This essay thus examines how thinking, feeling, and representing through disability provides a new way of conceptualizing the nation and critically engages with ideas and ideals of ‘disability publics’. Disability is rendered into a representation and while tension exists between feeling good and feeling bad, the specter of a contentious disability politics is kept at bay.

Occupying Seats, Occupying Space, Occupying Time: Deaf Young Adults in Vocational Training Centers in Bangalore, India

This chapter explores how sign language-using deaf young adults in Bangalore, India “occupy” vocational training centers set up for disabled people. Bangalore has many such centers and as disability has become a concept of great interest to both the state and civil society, additional centers are emerging. “Occupy” here has three meanings: the first relates to administrators’ need for bodies to occupy seats in order to satisfy their funders’ desires for high numbers of trainees. As the number of physically disabled potential trainees has decreased, deaf trainees have become a significant source of numbers at these centers. As such, deaf trainees “occupy” seats. The second meaning relates to the ways that deaf trainees “occupy” these centers and recreate them in ways unintended, and often below the radar of, administrators and teachers. As most administrators and teachers do not know sign language and are unaware of deaf values and moral orientations, deaf trainees create their own pedagogical spaces in which they teach each other, share news, and discuss ways of developing as deaf people. The third meaning has to do with “occupying” time: these vocational training centers are often spaces of urgency and anxiety as deaf trainees frantically try to learn something in the aftermath of primary and secondary school educational experiences that have failed them miserably. This time of trying to learn something is often a time of intense waiting as trainees wait to learn skills and then wait to find employment. Utilizing ethnographic data, this chapter argues for the importance of understanding the multiple registers of how vocational training spaces are utilized.

Understanding Sign Language Bibles through Affective Audits in South India

ABSTRACT This article analyses the role that the emic category of understanding plays in creating new forms of personhood and new worlds for sign language using deaf people in south India. As an ethnographic study of the production, dissemination, and circulation of Indian Sign Language Bible DVDs by an international non-denominational Christian missionary organization, this article analyses how the power of sign language as heart language lies in the potentiality of becoming a fluent signer and a member of a deaf sociality. Bringing the Anthropology of Christianity in conversation with the Anthropology of deafness/sign language studies, this article argues that anthropologists have ignored practices of verifying understanding in our interlocutors. In utilizing the concept of affective audits, this article analyses the practices by which understanding comes to take place. In addition, this article also argues that anthropologists must attend to how research on sensory formations might be presuming a ‘normal’ sensing body.

Leprosy and a life in South India: journeys with a Tamil Brahmin

analytics are better explored than others. The arguments regarding spatial contestations and control, both equally fragmented in the first half, is cohesive. The cityscape holds ethnographic centre-stage, perhaps at the cost of some actors; for example, ‘non-Manipuris’, the term used to refer to migrants from outside Manipur, remains an opaque category despite its evident influence on the political economy of the disturbed city. Imphal as a ‘borderland city’ is not explicitly engaged with, except in the chapter on healthcare. While the origin of goods – from food and clothes to building materials – and popular cultural trends reference the flows that situate Imphal in a geography stretching eastwards beyond Indian and ‘South Asian’ borders, these do not self-evidently make a borderland city. As ‘frontier’, ‘gateway’, and ‘disturbed’ are explored as key signifiers for the city, with polyvalent lives at multiple scales, ‘borderland’ misses this complexity. The contradictory relations between the central and state governments borne out in struggles over memorialization and history-making on the one hand, and development and liberalization on the other, could have been theorized more explicitly from the book’s rich ethnographic vantage point. This would have provided more continuity between the two halves of the book. Indeed, as McDuie-Ra concludes, further research on the life of liberalization in urban Asian borderlands is necessary to complement and nuance existing literature that is largely based on metropolitan centres. This book leads by example.