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Signing and Belonging in Nepal, by Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2016, 176 pp., cloth, $60.00, ISBN: 978-1-56368-664-1)
ONE OF THE newest offerings by Gallaudet University Press is Signing and Belonging in Nepal, a slim volume by Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway, a hearing linguistic anthropologist. This ethnography is the latest contribution to a growing body of work in the anthropology of deaf groups in the Global South. Currently the chair of the Department of Anthropology at Oberlin College, Hoffmann-Dilloway conducted most of her fieldwork as a graduate student in Nepal between 2001 and 2008. This volume is based primarily on the data Hoffmann-Dilloway collected during this period and, as such, should be understood as a partial glimpse into the lives of deaf people in Nepal during this time. Divided into six chapters and an afterword, this book is presented as an introductory volume for undergraduates.
In the introductory chapter, Hoffmann-Dilloway lays out her arguments and the theoretical framework for her analysis. She introduces her approach to ?language? and provides an overview of specific concepts from linguistic anthropology. The chapter also presents the arguments that she takes up throughout the book and contextualizes Nepal, as well as her methodology and positionality. Chapter 2 provides the historical and social context for the underpinnings of Hoffmann-Dilloway?s arguments, such as Nepali conceptualizations of personhood, social categories, and national context. In chapter 3, Hoffmann-Dilloway argues that Nepali associations of deaf people linked a standardized Nepali Sign Language and a Deaf identity with practices and symbols of high-caste Hinduism connoting good karma and purity in order to combat the understanding of deafness as a stigma. Chapter 4 is a continuation of the author's discussion of Nepal's deaf community and some of its understandings of language, such as situating the origins of Nepali Sign Language in...