Customer Reviews

Inside Deaf Culture

5 star:		(10)
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My dad picked this book up since I just underwent a Cochlear Implant. I was born with some hearing and over the years I started to lose more and more of it. And while I was growing up, there were talk about the Deaf Culture and hearing impairment. I have never been a part of the Deaf Culture. I probably never will be. At my dad's urging and recommendation, I read this book.

This book is a compilation of the Deaf Culture history ~~ how sign language came into being, the Deaf Clubs that were so popular till the 1960s, the Deaf Schools, and how they are fighting to perserve their heritage. It is a slim volume packed with interesting facts and observations ~~ I couldn't put the book down.

This book is bound to be controversial among cicles ~~ both hearing and in the Deaf Culture. This is the first I've heard of the authors too ~~ and I may be interested enough to read their other books to get more of an idea of what their philosophies are and so on. It is very well-written, thought-provoking and interesting. It is disturbing in some parts and in other parts, it leaves the reader with more questions than answers.

If you are interested in the history of the Deaf Culture, this book is one of the best places to start. It may have the answers you're looking for or not.

5-12-05

Inside Deaf Culture; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 224 pages

Inside Deaf Culture is written by two well-known professors of ASL and Deaf Studies. Both authors are Deaf and in the later chapters, discuss their different backgrounds.

I would recommend this book to anyone studying Deaf Culture, ASL, linguistics, anthropology, social change in America, Deaf people, parents of Deaf children, educators and any one else interested in the history and struggles of minority groups. The book can also be used as a Deaf history reference book for Deaf and hard of hearing students.

In the book, the authors describe Deaf life in America from the beginning of the country to the present age. In so doing, they poignantly write about the blight of Deaf in America over the years. The book includes some less than glowing reports about the motives of people who were instrumental establishing some of the earliest schools for the Deaf in the county. The authors tell us of abuses of power and scandals that occurred in some of these early schools. The authors describe how historically, people in positions of authority who made decisions for and about what Deaf people could and could not do at school, work and in communities were usually hearing. Even so, early in the history of Deaf in America, schools for the Deaf played an enormous role in bringing Deaf people together.

The authors also tell us how early United States history, the hearing community practices of segregating Africa Americans was also reflected in early Deaf education and in the Deaf community. The accounts are told with frankness. We learn how Deaf people were often discriminated against as a group. We also learn how this discrimination was even more oppressive for Deaf African-Americans.

In summary, the book contains an abundance of information the history of the Deaf community in the United States. I would recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about the Deaf community.

Other reviews here have touched on some of the specific points made in the book, so I would like to share instead my personal reaction to this book. What struck me the most is the tension running through each chapter between community and coercion. The very early history of schools for the deaf in the United States is inseparable from the growing introduction in the early nineteenth century of the expert management of civil society. Like prisons or asylums for the insane, schools for the deaf exercised direct control over student's bodies, starting from the fact that the institution became the legal guardian of the student. This coercive placement, both physical and social, however, represented for many student's their first encounter with other deaf people, with whom they would often form life-long friendships. This was, and continues even today to be, such a strong identity forming process, that many students considered these schools the places they "were from", and not the towns or cities they were born in.
This is something that I have thought about often since reading this book, for it brings me to questions about the ways in which we negotiate our identity with the people and institutions around us, which can provide us with growth and with pain at the same time. This touched me the most in the moving accounts of both suffering and profound connection that the authors are intimately familiar with.

This book offers a good introduction about the African American deaf community that exists as a miniority within a Deaf minority in America. If you are looking for a overview of the Deaf Culture then this is a good foundation book. The only downside about the book is that some of the chapers seem to be a mirror of previous chapters only about a different geographical Deaf community. However, given the limited number of resources about Deaf culture it is definitely worth reading.

Inside Deaf Culture examines the history of the deaf community and the emergence of Deaf culture. This history encompasses the institutionalization of deaf children in special schools, the Deaf clubs that provided a space for advocacy and socializing, the Deaf performances that acknowledged and encouraged the creativity through sign, and the debates within and out of the Deaf community about Deaf culture and the legitimacy of American Sign Language.

Throughout the book, Padden and Humphries trace and examine the separation and control of Deaf people. They use interviews, personal memories, and historical documents to give a variety of perspectives on what the institutionalization of the Deaf into special schools has meant for the Deaf community. They explore how even the earliest separations of children - by gender, race, and teaching method - impacted the community as the children grew up. These issues are brought into the present as Padden & Humphries discuss cochlear implants.

Padden and Humphries also discuss the internal and external struggle to recognize Deaf culture. Having experienced the struggles themselves, the authors fully recognize that the legitimization of Deaf culture and American Sign Language did not come easily. They do an excellent job of how Deaf culture allowed the Deaf community a "thread of connection to the past" (161) while also recognizing that Deaf culture and ASL was not always greeted positively or without suspicions, even within the Deaf community.

The book is easy to read and provides a fascinating look into the struggles of Deaf culture, past and present.

Inside Deaf Culture presents a beautifully well-written, grounded, and historical exploration of Deaf culture. The book is in part about ASL as a medium for cultural expression. It is also about the history of Deaf culture, its struggle for recognition and struggle with questions of what it means to be a culture. Culture cannot be defined by a dictionary nor reduced to theatrical performance. Rather, it is practices in everyday life. How then, the authors ask, does one define culture or declare who is a member of that culture? Where are the boundaries?

Padden and Humphries find that cultures give us spaces of separation and inclusion. They describe the segregation the Deaf community has experienced from without and within by institution, race, teaching methods, how a person became deaf, extent of hearing-loss, and adoption of technology to help hear. As deaf people are constrained through the management of their bodies, these boundaries can also be liberating as ideas and goals are shared, new practices developed, new spaces of belonging created.

The authors also demonstrates through the history of the Deaf community how shifts in physical geographies lead to shifts in social relations from which emerge shifts in language and culture. As physical boundaries disappear (such as a decrease in the number of deaf educational institutions and community gathering spaces), language is used to stake out new edges. Boundaries become mediated through voice and sign, not fences.

The book emphasizes that culture exists within a history made up of individuals, social forces and conflicts. Padden and Humphries show very well how the border between the body and the world is always mediated (for example, through ASL), changing, and reiterated in every moment through the circumstances of the present.

This book can be helpful to anyone working with the idea of culture. Not only does it provide a solid example of a good analysis, but it opened my eyes to the nuances of what culture means and the importance of individuals in the larger cultural scheme.

Inside Deaf Culture chronicles and engages the emergence and acceptance of the concept of Deaf culture. Padden and Humphries situate themselves as children of a historical period during which the idea of Deaf culture had not yet emerged, while asserting that Deaf culture did already exist as a culture. As the debate over Deaf culture and language arose during their college years, their account of the history and development of a group identity among deaf people therefore intersects with their own biographies. They argue that the self-definition as a culture allowed Deaf people a sense of wholeness as both Deaf people and hearing people learned to see the Deaf community as culturally rich and empowered. They examine influential moments in the history of that community, showing throughout how the themes of the challenge of voice and of the struggle against power imbalances resonate from the nineteenth century, with its prevalence of oralism, asylums, and eugenics, to the twenty first century, and the emergence of cochlear implants and the Human Genome Project.
The theme of the struggle for voice is fundamental to Padden and Humphries's account. Deaf culture emerges to be recognized as a whole culture like other cultures, but nonetheless it does have its own distinct political goals. Padden and Humphries show the enduring impact of the nineteenth-century schools for the deaf, with their censure of sign language and their insistence on oralist teaching methods. They assert that, because of these early forms of segregation and separation, the struggle for the use and management of voice, and to make sign language intelligible, is the basis for nearly every political act within the Deaf community. They chronicle the shift in public perception of the Deaf, from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, when deafness and muteness were linked, to the means by which new links were forged, connecting deaf culture with spoken voice; from the conception of speech and language as inseparable to the recent recognition by a hearing world of American Sign Language as a language.
The theme of the struggle against power imbalances is also central. Again, Padden and Humphries stress the historical legacy of the early-nineteenth-century asylums, the practices of which-naming, management, classification, control, separation-constitute the imbalance of power inherent to these institutions. They discuss the conflictual nature of that legacy, as even while the institution made deaf children vulnerable to abuses of power it also forged them into a sign language community. This conflict remains unresolved, as the authors question how deaf children can be educated within a community, which is what Deaf people want, without repeating the patterns of the nineteenth-century asylum where the Deaf are rendered powerless.
The concluding chapter discusses the contemporary situation and the continued relevance of these two themes in the current age of cochlear implants and the Human Genome Project. Padden and Humphries situate Deaf people within what they term as one of the deepest contradictions of the twenty-first century-the conflicting drives to acknowledge diversity on the one hand, and "repair" it on the other. They argue that the struggle for voice is crucial in order to communicate the risks of post-cochlear-implant social programs that are dangerously reminiscent of the nineteenth-century oralism. Padden and Humphries stress that the fact that Deaf people want to preserve their language and culture does not mean that they do not also want to embrace technology, and that the challenge is how to voice their perspectives on scientific technology in a world that finds it easier not to listen.
M Walsh's Review:Provocative. Speaking out from the inside, authors Carol Padden and Tom Humphries provide a compelling narrative of the historical, cultural, and contemporary forces that influence the lives of the deaf. Only within the last 30 years has academic literature about deafness shifted its account from one centered on pathology and the search for a cure, to a more nuanced, intimate examination of sociocultural perspectives that open readers' ears, inclining them into a deeper understanding of deaf culture and the deaf experience. In their exciting new book, Inside Deaf Culture, Padden and Humphries give readers a chronological tour of the moments that they've identified as the most influential in shaping the deaf community.
The book opens with a haunting look into the power dynamics of the hearing community, beginning with allegations that molestation was prevalent in the first schools for deaf children. While they highlight how power, control, and repression are forces that course through this history, shaping people's identity and influencing their attitudes about deaf schools, Padden and Humphries do not oversimplify the history. Their account acknowledges the crucial role that the schools played in transmitting culture, the role the schools played in providing a vehicle for communication across hearing and Deaf communities, and importantly, a place for the Deaf to join in community. Descriptions of burgeoning Deaf social clubs during the mid twentieth century, the height of Deaf theatre, and the effects the Second World War had on the Deaf community are inflected with the voices of friends, family members, and colleagues that they interviewed. Their attempt to remember an era, and their effort to record the stories of a different generation, is what draws readers closer to the page. It's what pulls readers into a conversation that they cannot walk away from.
Inside Deaf Culture is a book for multiple audiences. Graceful prose, a kaleidoscope of examples, personal narrative, and the authors' clear passion to preserve the history and culture of the Deaf community - complete with its bruises and its triumphs - make this a valuable book for students, professors, and anyone interested in understanding Deaf culture. Breaking the silence, Padden and Humphries offer a moving tour through the powerful and complicated history of Deaf culture, allowing readers to hear the resounding voices of a community many of us have never before heard.

...not what I expected. The first half is pretty much a huge history lesson on the delevopment of Deaf schools & ASL, and although it was interesting at parts it seemed to drag for awhile. Then it gets more into current issues in Deaf culture but still dabbles in the history at times.

I would not say that the book is "bad" at all. It's just I was expecting more scenerios concerning: behaviors, Deaf opinions on hearing, changes in technology/communication, etc. I too believe it is a necessary read for those hearing who want to learn ASL. It helps you appreciate the culture much more and helps you to not look at Deaf people as handicapped.

Padden & Humphries, husband & wife, both wrote a wonderful book that is much needed in terms of how Deaf Culture was or what it looked like in the days of the past. To me, "Inside Deaf Culture" is a follow-up from their previous book, "Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture". The difference is the latter is introductory by explaining different aspects of what Deaf culture is. The former contains selected pieces of Deaf history or rather, incidents and circumstances where the authors explain or pinpoint where some aspects of the Deaf culture originated.

For me, the most interesting parts of this book were the incidents occurring inside the Deaf residential schools. For most of us who are familiar with Deaf history, we know that the American School for the Deaf (Hartford, Connecticut) was the first permanent Deaf school and was established by Thomas H. Gallaudet, Laurent Clerc and Dr. Mason Cogswell. We also know that the Kentucky School for the Deaf was the first state-supported Deaf school. However, for many of us, we don't know what happened in the schools, whether they be good or bad.

Padden & Humphries bring light to some of the Deaf schools' darkest secrets. In addition, they also shed light to segregation between the Black and White Deaf residential schools. They don't stop there. They continue with voice, oralism, employment, theatre, American Sign Language (ASL) and of course, culture.

*Inside Deaf Culture* is an excellent book that is highly recommended for those in the Deaf-related fields. This book is also easy reading for those who are not knowledgeable of the Deaf community.

Carol Padden and Tom Humphries weave together the historical and cultural aspect of the Deaf community in the book Inside Deaf Culture. They achieve this through a collection of historical data, interviews and personal memories. The book offers accounts of the institutionalization of separate schools, the emergence and decline of social clubs and Deaf theatre.

Within the discourse of spoken voice and Deaf theatre the book offers a very interesting discussion on performance as providing a point of intersection between Deaf and hearing audiences. Innovations in theatre such as blocking, complexities of signing and dialogues were some of the changes that were brought about due to the increasing interest in Deaf theatre. They write, "Where silence was once not noticed, it was now a commodity, and for that matter, made even more emphatic by voice interpretation. Signing was the manner of performing, and it was itself the performance. Astonished, the Deaf actors began to look at their own hands, and literally began to watch themselves sign." (124).

The book focusing on the struggles around the legitimacy of the American Sign Language (ASL) again suggests a rethinking of how we interpret language. ASL came to be understood not as a signing of the English language but as a language in its own right, with its own sets of signs and meanings that could not be found in the English language. This is demonstrated in Dorothy Miles' work discussed in the book. Padden and Humphries also refer to other poets and performers who were constantly trying to find ways to step beyond the confines of language and culture. They further write, "The cultural is neither here nor there, but is borne through history, made anew by the circumstances of the present. Cultures suggest a fixedness of place and time. The cultural offers a fluid idea of how experience and expression come together. The cultural resides in things, in behaviors as well as in performance." (142).