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Sensing the rhythms of everyday life: Temporal integration and tactile translation in the Seattle Deaf-Blind community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2012

Terra Edwards
Terra Edwards
Affiliation:
The University of California, Berkeley, Department of Anthropology, 232 Kroeber Hall Berkeley, CA 94720-3710, USAterraedwards@berkeley.edu
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Abstract

This article is concerned with how social actors establish relations between language, the body, and the physical and social environment. The empirical focus is a series of interactions between Deaf-Blind people and tactile signed language interpreters in Seattle, Washington. Many members of the Seattle Deaf-Blind community were born deaf and, due to a genetic condition, lose their vision slowly over the course of many years. Drawing on recent work in language and practice theory, I argue that these relations are established by Deaf-Blind people through processes of integration whereby continuity between linguistic, embodied, and social elements of a fading visual order are made continuous with corresponding elements in an emerging tactile order. In doing so, I contribute to current attempts in linguistic anthropology to model the means by which embodied, linguistic, and social phenomena crystallize in relational patterns to yield worlds that take on the appearance of concreteness and naturalness. (Classifiers, Deaf-Blind, integration, interpretation, language and embodiment, practice, rhythm, Tactile American Sign Language, tactility)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 29 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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