In this engaging ethnography, the anthropologist Michele Friedner offers a detailed analysis of the value differently positioned social actors derived from deafness in India (primarily Bangalore/Bengaluru) during the period of 2005–14. In addition to providing a rich portrait of how deaf signers come to take “deaf turns” (p. 2) in becoming socially and morally orientated to one another, she also explores how, in post-liberalization India, corporations, NGOs, and multilevel marketing businesses “extract” value from deaf workers. Friedner carefully reveals confluence and tension between these types of value. She shows how such work settings afford spaces for deaf workers to pursue “deaf development”—“deaf-centered, and therefore sign language-centered, structures and institutions that help deaf people develop language, educational, economic, social, and moral skills for being in the world as both a member of deaf sociality and part of the larger normal world” (p. 2). However, she also makes clear that while such corporations benefit from the presence of deaf workers in many ways, they also undercut the future-oriented trajectory of deaf development by limiting deaf workers’ mobility in positions that lack a clear trajectory for advancement and expansion. Thus, while Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India widens the lens of the literature on disability in the Global South past a narrow focus on suffering and poverty, it nevertheless offers an incisive critique of neoliberal engagements with “diversity.”
In an introductory chapter, Friedner situates the terms and concepts that provide her analytical frame. These cleave very closely to emic terms and concepts attested to in the discourse of Indian deaf signers, including use of terms like “deafs” and “normals,” which may be initially jarring to readers accustomed to other terminologies, but which are clearly situated by Friedner in terms of their local resonances. After reflexively situating her own role as a deaf ethnographer, Friedner lays out the framework for the following chapters, which are organized around distinct spaces: family homes, churches, vocation training centers, corporate offices, and multilevel marketing businesses. Though the separation of these settings into individual chapters reflects their physical distinctness (and indeed, in vignettes we get a sense of the travel throughout the city and country that deaf participants must undertake), Friedner is attentive to the various, often cyclical, temporalities through which her research partners circulate. This point is crystalized in her observation that deaf participants often used the same notebooks for multiple work trainings in different sites, such that the layered notes functioned as an “archaeology of knowledge creation” (p. 97).
Chapter 1 attends to the contexts from which some deaf people “disorient” in order to take deaf turns. In so doing, Friedner stresses that while socialization to relationships mediated by sign languages is an important component of such reorientation, this process is also about a change in stance: “learning sign language is never only about learning a language; it is also a process of coming to see it as a legitimate and valuable language in itself” (p. 46). Chapter 2 analyzes some of the different interactional routines and social spaces that facilitate such changing practices and alignments. While Chapters 1 and 2 thus primarily focus on how deaf people learn to value sign language and deaf sociality, the remaining chapters address how that value can be both cultivated and exploited in contexts in which deaf orientations become a source of economic value for “normal” institutions.
Chapter 3 focuses on the repeated circulation of deaf subjects through job training centers, to the point that, in some cases, such circulation essentially substitutes for employment (hence the chapter's title, “Circulation as Vocation”). Friedner shows that in the face of training that fails to convey “deep knowledge” (p. 74), deaf participants respond by socializing one another to a “moral economy of information sharing and exchange,” whereby their goals are not to “become self sufficient subjects who take care of themselves but to become deaf subjects who take care of each other” (p. 87). Chapter 4 sees these practices enacted in the “sameness” work in which deaf employees engage to smooth over differences in individual skill levels and to produce themselves as a cohesive group, providing yet more value extractable by companies, which are saved the work of fostering team camaraderie among employees.
Chapter 5 demonstrates how pyramid schemes likewise draw value from deaf participants, whose “dense social networks” could be transformed into “financial capital” in such a business structure (p. 132). The complications of reconciling a moral orientation to deaf sameness with the hierarchical structure of the pyramid schemes, however, points both to the potency of and the fault lines within the deaf networks here described. Ultimately, deaf hopes built on the success of such schemes—fantasies of funding institutions that would further reflect and produce deaf development, such as deaf-oriented old age homes, group travel, and better schools—were not (yet) realized, even as some deaf participants were enriched.
In the concluding chapter, Friedner joins her research partners in adopting an orientation to the future and considering other pathways through which “deaf development” can become an ethnographic fact as well as an analytical category.
This accessible yet sophisticated book has much to offer students and scholars in a range of fields and interests, including but not limited to Deaf studies and disability studies, along with studies of contemporary India and of the neoliberal workplace. In addition to pairing well with other ethnographies of deafness, this book would be an interesting companion to recent books like Francis Cody's The Light of Knowledge: Literacy Activism and the Politics of Writing in South India (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013) or Shalini Shankar's Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian American Consumers (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).
