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Several scholars have asked what are the relations between two recently developed concepts, Deaf ethnicity and Deafhood. The emergence of these concepts, along with others such as "audism" (Humphries 1977), "dysconscious audism,""Sign Language Peoples," and "Deaf Gain" reflects important attempts by Deaf communities and their allies to redefine Deaf peoples, their cultures, and their languages. As part of the same process, starting in the 1990s, older concepts such as "People of the Eye," have been presented anew, and externally generated concepts such as postcolonialism have been brought to bear.
Similar processes of redefining identity can be found among other minority groups, such as African Americans, women, gays and lesbians and disabled people, all of whom have felt the need to escape the reductionist lens of definitions created by oppressors, developing instead conceptualizations that assist with the liberation of their communities. "Deaf ethnicity" and "Deafhood" are two such conceptualizations. We start by explaining "Deaf ethnicity" and "Deafhood," and then we address their relations.
Deaf Ethnicity
In The People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry Lane, Pillard, and Hedberg (2011) make the case that the American Deaf-Wo rid (the American Sign Language minority) is an ethnic group. An ethnic group is "a collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of their peoplehood" (Schermerhorn 1978, 12).
The People of the Eye compares the properties of the American Deaf-World to those of ethnic groups. We enumerate those shared properties here, referring the reader to the book for discussion and literature citations. Those ethnic properties are: language, bonding to one's own kind, culture, social institutions, the arts, history, territory, kinship, socialization, and boundary maintenance.The language of an ethnic group plays many roles: It is the vehicle for transmission of cultural patrimony through the generations; it expresses traditions, rituals, norms, and values; it is a means of social interaction among group members, a symbol of their ethnicity and frequently the "epitome of their peoplehood" (ibid).These are indeed also the roles fulfilled by the language of the American Deaf-World, American Sign Language.
A deep feeling of belonging characterizes the members of ethnic groups and that is surely...