Being and Hearing

Front matter

Hau

BOOKS

In tribute to the foundational, yet productively contentious, nature of the ethnographic imagination in anthropology, this series honors the creator of the term “ethnographic theory” himself. Monographs included in this series represent unique contributions to anthropology and showcase groundbreaking work that contributes to the emergence of new ethnographically-inspired theories or challenge the way the “ethnographic” is conceived today.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Chapter 1. Arjun: The sense of things Homecomings Not knowing Arjun Linguistic dilemmas Making sense The presence of Arjun

Chapter 2. Intelligible worlds Necessary words Finding the deaf Deaf geographies The world is not as we think it is Raghav: being two things

Chapter I

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all—what then would life be but despair?

HOMECOMINGS

Arjun Gurung is deaf. He lives in a small room on the third floor of a backpacker hotel in northeastern Nepal. His family has owned this hotel since before he was born, and over the last few years especially they've earned an international reputation as warm and capable hosts. Their hotel is located on a minor trekking route, and this location brings both tourists and tourist dollars to an otherwise remote and generally poor part of the country. Though Arjun’s family has been prominent in the area for many generations, the cash generated by their hotel has allowed them to maintain this prominence over the past few decades as they, like all Nepalis, enter into increasingly global frames of reference.

I first met Arjun in the summer of 2007, when both he and I were in our late twenties. I was on a short break from fieldwork,! and I had booked a room in his family’s hotel completely unaware that a deaf man lived there. Arjun himself had come home only recently after living for more than two decades in Kathmandu, first at a boarding school for the deaf and then later in an apartment with friends. Now back home, he stands out. In ways apparent even to outsiders, he just doesn’t look like he comes from here. His family’s hotel basks in a carefully maintained veneer of rural authenticity, and it is surrounded for miles on all sides by the more functional assemblage of new and old that characterizes subsistence farming. Arjun, by contrast, is instantly recognizable as an eager participant in Nepal’s emerging urban middle class. He wears jeans and designer tee-shirts, he follows the international soccer scene, and he prefers foreign-brand beer to his mother’s (excellent) homemade apple brandy. His habits, appearance, and disposition simply do not fit with the environment around him. By his own admission, he felt more comfortable in the city. He says he misses it dearly now that he is away.

As the only deaf person within a ten-mile walk, Arjun probably also misses the large and vibrant deaf community that comprised his daily world when he lived in Kathmandu. In Nepal, the deaf care deeply about one another. Though Arjun would no doubt laugh at the sentimentality of my words here, I think he would, with some caveats, ultimately agree. The bonds of language,

1. ‘The accounts in this book are the product of roughly four years of immersive fieldwork conducted between 2003 and 2018. In this chapter, my descriptions of Arjun draw primarily from a period about a year following our first meeting. During that time, I visited him frequently at his home, and my experiences there motivated a major shift in my methodological engagements with deaf Nepal. Previously, across a series of shorter research trips between 2003 and 2006, I focused my attention on political expression in the institutional spaces where deaf people congregate. This preliminary work anticipated the tone of my longest continuous stretch of fieldwork, which took place over eighteen months in 2007 and 2008. These years were characterized by dramatic political changes for Nepal in general and for deaf Nepal in particular. These changes culminated in a comprehensive peace agreement that ended the decades-long civil war and a contentious election that saw Nepal’s first deaf politician join the country’s highest legislative body (see chapter 2). During this period, I began to spend more and more time with the deaf people I knew in their mostly hearing homes, following them especially as they moved between their deaf and hearing worlds. This new approach has characterized my relationship with deaf Nepalis since then, especially in short follow-up field visits in 2009 and 2012 and in a more ongoing engagement living and working in Kathmandu from 2014 to the present.

aid, obligation, and friendship that deaf people build are frequently the most powerful and durable parts of their lives. These specifically deaf relationships often outshine (though never fully erase) all their ties to the hearing, relegating even parents, siblings, spouses, and neighbors to the emotional periphery of deaf lives. When those like Arjun from remote parts of the country arrive for the first time in deaf Kathmandu, they tend to describe the experience as a homecoming, steeped in feelings of kinship and belonging. For most, returning completely to the hearing world, like Arjun has done, would be unthinkable.

Arjun, however, tends to shrug off most questions about his place amongst the hearing with a characteristic reserve. He has no plans to leave, he says, so the question of whether he /ikes being back home just isn’t relevant or interesting. ‘This kind of self-effacement was very typical of Arjun in the time I knew him. He is friendly but cool, engaging but undemonstrative, and most of all always very self-composed. He tells great stories, but his affect is so flat that it can be hard to know how he intends for his audiences to react. Though I am certain that Arjun misses his deaf friends back in Kathmandu, he never admitted it to me.

Conversations about politics, however, often leave Arjun visibly angry. In particular, he is angry about rural Nepal’s “lack of development,” which for him seems to describe a particular mindset more than any absence of infrastructure. Nepal is a country of vast potential, he says, but it is stifled by a range of deep problems: corrupt politicians, backwards-thinking citizens, ineffective foreign aid, and—especially—an archaic and burdensome system of kinship obligations. These are familiar targets of middle-class frustration in contemporary Nepal, but for Arjun they are all explicitly rooted in a more basic question of individual desire. How, he would often ask, are we meant to resolve the tensions between what people want for themselves and what is good for their communities? To hear him tell it, the entirety of Nepal’s recent history is a story about the rise of individualism. He attributed these transformations mostly to Western influences, though it was not always clear to me whether he understood the changes he saw as the cause of or the solution to rural Nepal’s many contemporary problems. Perhaps he meant them to be both. In any case, Arjun always seemed to me preoccupied by the question of what it means to be someone who wants things. This same air of irresolution—where the personal and the social collide—colored every account I heard Arjun make of his life and especially his decision to return home.

Arjun is home because his parents expected him to marry and because he reluctantly agreed that it was time. He sold his few things in the capital, bought a tourist-class bus ticket to a nearby trekking hub, and walked the seven remaining hours home. Two months later, he was married. None of his friends from Kathmandu were invited to the banquet, though Arjun says he has no regrets. He says he likes being married, but he adds that he is in no rush to have children. He cites Nepal’s poor political situation and a lack of good schools in the area as reasons to wait a few more years. He admits that this decision has become a point of contention with Suddha, his wife. Suddha is not deaf, nor does she know any deaf people other than her husband. She comes from a poor but wellregarded family of sharecroppers a half-day’s walk from the main road. Though she is significantly better educated than her very limiting socioeconomic background would predict, her manner, disposition, and dialect nevertheless make it very clear that she was born into a household quite different from the one in which she now lives. The class dynamics at play here are nuanced, but they also boil down to some very simple facts: Arjun’s maternal uncles are regional landlords of some note, and his father has a reputation for getting politicians elected; most of Suddha’s male relatives, meanwhile, are day laborers.

Nevertheless, things between Arjun and Suddha moved forward quickly because everyone agreed that the marriage was such an obviously good fit. At face value, this is a strange claim. Every visible sign tells the story of the couple’s very different life histories. They are affectionate with each other, but even a year after their wedding they were still often bashful and awkward in each other’s company. Arjun acknowledged this tension, which he attributed to the fits and starts of their learning how to interact. But marriage negotiations have a tendency to collapse otherwise incommensurate schemes of value. Given the preference in the area for marriage between equals, it would seem that Arjun’s deafness and Suddha’s humble station came somehow to balance in the tally of social status that preceded their match. This is actually a very familiar type of marriage in contemporary Nepal: men with discrete, personal stigmas (e.g., various disabilities, addictions, or personality “quirks”) often marry women with more gradient, familial disadvantages (e.g., low class, capital, or prestige). Though it is impolite to speak too explicitly about the benefits and compromises that a marriage alliance might bring, both families told me how relieved they are to have found each other. Even Arjun, though famously taciturn, is prone to gush about just how much he and Suddha are in love.

Despite his happy marriage, however, Arjun admits that he is desperately bored. In Kathmandu, he involved himself in political movements, dated both deaf and hearing girls, and worked as a tutor at the school that he had once attended. ‘Then, after more than twenty years away, he came back to a “home” he had visited only a few dozen times since childhood. He spends most of his time now doing chores around the hotel, but the work is repetitive and usually better handled by his family’s large and very competent staff. On top of it all, he doesn't even have other fluent signers to talk to. As Arjun puts it, there’s just not a lot to do here. He enjoys managing the family’s stable of horses and chatting with the international tourists who pass through town, but, these small pleasures aside, the transition has not been easy. More than once, I arrived at the hotel to find Arjun and his mother mired in the aftermath of an argument and actively ignoring each other. This is a very familiar story in contemporary Nepal’s emerging middle classes: A young son from a prominent rural family is sent away to the capital city to get an education that is unavailable closer to home. While living there, he acquires tastes, habits, and ideas incompatible with the rhythms and values of everything he left behind. Though Arjun is deaf, the structure of his experience belongs to a much wider scope. He is, in many ways, very typical of an entire generation of dislocated youth.

‘There is a single detail, however, that makes this story unmistakably deaf: here at home, all of the people closest to Arjun believe that he is a simpleton. They think—incorrectly—that he has only a childish understanding of what goes on around him and that he is incapable of language or complex thought. ‘They are unaware, for example, that he can read, write, and even do basic bookkeeping. His English is arguably better than theirs, and he has a decent grasp of French, German, Hebrew, and Japanese. He has cultivated this polylingualism in a series of meticulously organized notebooks, each filled with words and phrases taught to him by his international clientele. He often studies these notebooks late into the night, and he says that one day he hopes to compile them into a universal dictionary and phrasebook. In ways that would seem obvious, Arjun is exceptionally intelligent. He has a bone-dry sense of humor with a strong penchant for sarcasm; he follows national politics but chooses not to vote; and he considers professional wrestling (which his parents adore) to reflect poorly on American culture. He is the only person within a half-day’s walk who understands the hotel’s solar electric system, and he plans to buy a few extra panels in the near future to power a television and an Xbox. Within virtually any other frame of recognition, Arjun would be unmistakable as the most cosmopolitan member of his family. Yet somehow his parents—though plainly devoted to the happiness of their only child—believe that he is an actual, literal idiot.

For reasons that are not yet clear, Arjun’s family members do not easily see in him the elaborate structures of mind that they take for granted in each other and in everyone else. He is, to them, almost animal-like in his way of being a person. The precise entailments of this assessment are nuanced enough, complex enough, and culturally specific enough to justify the remainder of this chapter’s attention, but as a beginning let it suffice to say that he is treated by those around him as the kind of person from whom very little should be expected and to whom very little should be offered. Neighbors and cousins talk about Arjun with diminutive pronouns more appropriate for toddlers, dogs, or bad drivers, and the trekking guides who come through town have been known to get drunk and tease him, ostensibly for not understanding that he is being teased. For her part, Arjun’s mother often relates how proud she is of her son, and yet even her most boastful stories invariably highlight behaviors that would be unremarkable from any adult man seen as fully competent. That Arjun can, for example, feed and clothe himself, travel into town alone, and follow simple housekeeping routines apparently strikes her as something worth bragging about. Meanwhile, she seems not even to notice her son’s many complex engagements with the world outside his home. Instead, the broader scope of Arjun’s human experience—virtually everything he thinks, does, and is—remains somehow lost to the noise.

Arjun is characteristically stoic about these circumstances, but it is hard for me not to feel staggered by frustration on his behalf. After all, social life is built on the premise of intersubjectivity. Knowing other people means having ways of speculating about what they are experiencing. Skeptics might argue that we can never truly know anything about the minds of others, but in Nepal at least this posture of solipsism is at most a thought experiment and never actually a way of relating to real people in the world. Instead, under all normal circumstances, we sense purpose in the things that others do. We perceive in their actions the presence of thoughts, sentiments, and drives—unique in configuration perhaps but ultimately human in nature. Even when the connections between outward actions and internal mental states are hard to see, we maintain a deep trust in the fact that they exist (see Robbins 2008; Robbins and Rumsey 2008). Ethnographic research, in particular, would be inconceivable without the orienting assumption that people everywhere have minds that make sense. This is what Adolf Bastian famously called the “psychic unity of mankind,” and it is what allows us—even in the face of stark cultural difference—to engage coherently with others. Arjun is somehow exempt from this unity at home, and in this book my aim is to understand how and why that came to be.

NOT KNOWING ARJUN

In telling Arjun’s story here, my goal is not to suggest that he is in any way typical. Indeed, deaf lives in Nepal are widely diverse, and the sheer extent of Arjun’s isolation is actually quite unusual. His experience of living at the margins of hearing expectations, however, is universal. Deaf lives are lived in predominantly hearing worlds, and hearing worlds often do a very poor job of relating to deaf experiences. Especially in matters of identity, language, and personhood, the deaf are constantly misunderstood. In recent years, documenting and correcting this history has been the primary aim of the newly emerging academic discipline known as deaf studies. Since its rise in the 1960s amidst the successes of humanism, feminism, and the civil rights movement, deaf studies has worked hard to demonstrate the value and complexity of everything native to deaf communities (Ladd 2003; Padden and Humphries 2009). Central to this ambition has been an explicitly ethnographic argument: namely, when we consider the various languages, beliefs, and practices of deaf communities worldwide, we should understand them not merely as adaptations to the hearing world but instead as the autonomous, constituting parts of a distinctly deaf cultural modality (see, e.g., Monaghan et al. 2003). According to this framework of analysis, Arjun’s dilemma would be very familiar: though his family members see his disability, they fail completely to understand his identity.

This emphasis on identity as a driver of cultural difference has been tremendously productive for deaf studies, but there are some hard constraints on what it can reveal. It grants complexity to deaf communities precisely by stripping it from the families, publics, and contexts in which deaf people are always immersed. Arjun’s mother, for example, ¢a/ks about her son as someone flatly deprived of human capacities, but she does not always acz as if this is so. In day-to-day practice, her engagements are much more contextually entangled. She sees Arjun affable and animated with the backpackers who pass through town, and she relies on him to attend to their needs as customers. What she seems not to perceive, however, is the substance of interiority that should normally accompany these behaviors. Even as Arjun manages food orders, guest check-ins, and complicated billing cycles effectively, she believes that he acts with no real understanding of what he does. As she puts it, “The tourists are nice to him, but he doesn't understand them. He brings them the menus, but he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t even know what menus are for. He smiles because they smile.”

The tourists themselves, meanwhile, interpreted their interactions with Arjun very differently. They felt uncomfortable initially, they said, but ultimately they were surprised by how easy it was to interact with him despite his deafness. Indeed, Arjun is a master at putting his guests at ease. He shows interest in their lives, and he teaches them with obvious pleasure how he communicates effectively. On the occasions that I observed it, this would usually begin with simple gestures supported by notes written on scraps of paper, which then progressed over the course of the evening through increasingly elaborate acts of pantomime (accompanied, usually, by no small amount of both laughter and alcohol). People /ike Arjun. He is an excellent host. Every morning, before the tourists set off to continue further up the mountain, they linger with him over long goodbyes. His notebooks are filled with the messages of remembrance that they have left, and he regularly gets thick stacks of postcards delivered from abroad. When I asked Arjun’s mother about these interactions, however, she merely smiled and reaffirmed how nice it was that the foreigners were kind to her son.

For a man understood to be a simpleton, Arjun is remarkably effective at navigating the nuances of cross-cultural customer service. This alignment of circumstances would seem to present an obvious paradox, but critically his mother does not experience it as such. She loves her son, and she tells anyone who will listen how glad she is to have him back at home. Nevertheless—somehow—she perceives remarkably little about him. In the places that should be filled by meaning, she sees instead actions without purpose and efficacy without understanding. These assessments are conspicuous and difficult to explain. After all, Arjun’s mother is a lodger of foreign tourists by trade, and she is surrounded constantly by people she does not understand. Most of her guests speak languages that she doesn’t know, and they all have habits and dispositions that she finds strange. In a very real way, her livelihood is built from the gaps left by cultural and linguistic difference, and yet she does not hesitate to fill these gaps with meaning, or at least the possibility of it. On one occasion, she even pressed me with obvious amusement to explain why foreigners are so eager to carry heavy backpacks up a mountain and call it a “vacation.” In the end, she concluded it must have something to do with “American culture.” In this capacity and countless others, her ways of not knowing her guests are very different from her ways of not knowing her son.

On one particular visit, for example, I arrived to find Arjun’s mother stumbling over herself to explain a complicated bill to a Japanese tourist. The conversation wasn't going well, and both of them were struggling to maintain their good humor. Her guest was upset, and it wasnt clear to her why. This led her to speculate urgently about the contents of his mind. The problem, she guessed, had something to do with how lodging for his porters had been tallied, but that’s as far as she could get. In these moments of breakdown, the only thing she had at her disposal was a vast set of heuristics built through years of trial and error. She was adamant, for example, that one should never smile too much at Japanese people when they are feeling frustrated. “It makes them mad,” she said. “That’s all I know.” In this regard, though her guest was profoundly foreign to her, his foreignness had in its own way come to be something familiar. It served not only to separate her from him but also to connect them together through a shared experience of mutual opacity: “I dont understand him, and he knows I don’t understand him, and I know that he knows that I don’t understand him... ,” she explained with a laugh. About Arjun, her reflections are much simpler. “He’s dumb, poor thing. He knows his desires, but he understands nothing else.”

It is as if there is a single rule that defines for Arjun’s family how everything he does should be interpreted: namely, his actions are only and exactly what they appear to be. They do not reveal something else about him, they do not indicate his state of mind, and they do not communicate his intentions or goals in anything but the most immediate sense. When Arjun gets on the roof to manipulate the solar panels, for example, his actions do not demonstrate that he understands electrical circuits; when he spends more than an hour each morning styling his hair and selecting his clothes, his choices do not reveal any interest in fashion; when he reads newspapers, journals, and magazines, his time spent does not suggest that he might be knowledgeable about politics and current events. Indeed, even as Arjun fills notebook after notebook with a staggering diversity of words and phrases, the fact that he can do so does not even demonstrate that he has access to language. Instead, when Arjun writes, his family perceives only and exactly that. He is not studying, he is not recording, and he is not communicating. He is merely applying ink to a sheet of paper, and nothing more.

Deaf people worldwide live amidst broad patterns of misrecognition, but these constraints on how Arjun’s actions can be interpreted are especially perplexing. As I will argue in the coming pages, understanding them properly requires careful attention to the details of his life and context. Nepali ways of not-knowing the deaf are deeply regional in their organization, and any other cultural configuration—built on any other set of epistemological practices, any other social architecture of perception, or any other history of discourse— could have situated Arjun in completely different circumstances. Indeed, this possibility that things could have been very different for Arjun is exactly what Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, described in his Natural History. In this massively ambitious catalog of everything, Leclerc includes the story of a young man in eighteenth-century France who, after more than twenty years of life, comes to hear and speak for the first time. What shocks his family and community, however, is less his miraculous cure than the revelations that come after:

A young man twenty-three to twenty-four years old, son of a craftsman of Chartres, deaf and dumb from birth, suddenly began to speak, to the great astonishment of all the city. It was known to him that some three or four months before he had heard the sound of bells, and had been extremely surprised by this new and unfamiliar sensation. Then a kind of water escaped his left ear, and he began to hear perfectly in both ears: for three or four months he listened without saying anything, and maturing in pronunciation and ideas of the words, and finally he thought himself able to break the silence, and it is said that he spoke though still imperfectly.

Skilled theologians immediately questioned him about his past state, and unraveled their main issues about God, the soul, the moral goodness or evil actions. He did not seem to have pushed his thoughts far.

Although born of literate Catholic parents, he attended Mass, and he was there instructed to make the sign of the cross and kneel in the capacity of a man who prays, he never had attached to all this any intention or other meaning; he knew not distinctly what it was that is death, and he never thought on it. (Buffon 1801, 231; see also Rée 1999, 92, for a different analysis thereof)

Though Leclerc’s anonymous young deaf man kneeled, took communion, and moved his lips in prayer, he did not in fact believe; he had no thoughts of death or what came after and no remembrance of Christ’s suffering. Instead, his religious devotion was mere replication. This minimal physicality was a sufficient mimesis because he found no reason to see the acts of those around him as anything more. There are clear echoes here of Arjun’s life, though the players and assumptions are conspicuously reversed. Just as Arjun’s parents never seem to question the constraints they perceive on the access Arjun has to everything that surrounds him, these parents of Chartres were horrified to learn that their son had copied their behaviors without also sharing their sense of purpose. Though these cases are built on diametrically opposed assessments of the deaf, they are unified by a single human tendency: people—when faced with the fact of actors and actions—maintain assumptions about the entailments of agency that are remarkably stable across time. Through a lifetime of interactions and potential disruptions, their intuitions perdure.

In my presence at least, the only person who ever expressed any doubt over these assessments of Arjun was Suddha, and her way of talking about her husband offers something of an exception to clarify the rule. Though her role as a young daughter-in-law in a busy household made it logistically difficult for me to interview her at any length, she was nevertheless always eager to talk. She stopped me repeatedly in passing moments, invariably to ask the same very pointed question: How could she know what Arjun is thinking? Initially, I found this a very strange question for her to be asking. Suddha is actually reasonably proficient as a signer. She is the only person in the immediate area who can communicate effectively with Arjun about anything more than basic topics. Nevertheless, this fact of access seems not to make her assessments any more straightforward. The hesitation she feels serves to color the intimacy the two of them share.

Arjun and Suddha often spend their evenings together in a gazebo adjoining the main house. Long after everyone else has gone to bed, they huddle close and talk for hours in the signed-language equivalent of hushed tones. To anyone listening, their interactions are silent, punctuated only by frequent laughter. To see them, however, is to realize how animated their time together is. On these nights, they occupy a space that is strikingly out of step with the rest of the hotel’s aesthetic. It is wallpapered with bold and garish posters, each juxtaposing an oversaturated stock image with an incongruous bit of reappropriated text. One photo of Alpine cottages bears the subtitle “Silence is consent,” for example, and another, featuring a basket of kittens, declares prominently that “The family is more sacred than the state.” Arjun’s favorite poster involves an assortment of traditionally dressed foreign natives lined up above the words “Love conquers all.” Arjun’s parents hate the gazebo and its loud colors. The fact that it even exists is a clear concession to his sense of style and a remembrance of his life in Kathmandu. For precisely this reason, perhaps, Arjun and Suddha prefer it to any other part of the hotel. When I asked each of them separately why they spent so much time there, both of them described it as the one place they could truly be alone. To outward appearances, at least, this is a very familiar scene: here is a young couple, fully enamored with each other, talking (as Arjun later explained to me) about their dreams for the future. When I asked Suddha about these long conversations, however, her response was heartfelt but also ambivalent and pained: “I like talking with him. We can talk all night. But, I don't know how much he understands. I think he does, a lot of it. But how can this be known?”