Disability and Deaf Studies and Anthropology
- LAST REVIEWED: 23 April 2021
- LAST MODIFIED: 27 February 2019
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0205
- LAST REVIEWED: 23 April 2021
- LAST MODIFIED: 27 February 2019
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0205
Introduction
This article presents works on Deaf culture and language and disability topics of interest to anthropologists, particularly sociocultural and linguistic anthropologists. While some of the work here comes directly out of the field of anthropology, including work in anthropology on disability and medical anthropology, other works are from interdisciplinary fields such as Deaf studies and disability studies. This review includes Literature Reviews and Encyclopedias, Theory, Anthologies, Ethnographies, and Memoirs and then two sections focusing on topics of particular interest to disability and Deaf studies scholars: Education, and Science, Ethics, and Eugenics. Finally, Journals and Web Resources are also listed. While disability studies and Deaf studies are closely related, they have different emphases, something reflected in the different categories of this article. Disability studies work often looks at the relationship between society and individuals. British disability work has a particularly strong societal emphasis including government policies and institutional practices around issues such as infrastructure and the environment. American disability studies emphasize more cultural issues including attitudes and artistic endeavors but still at a society-wide level. Concurrent with this focus on larger social structures are the individual stories of people living within societies. These individual stories are reflected in the numerous memoirs in the discipline. What British and American approaches share is a view of the social construction of disability, that society disables people by creating contexts where people cannot function or are excluded. The most obvious social constraints are physical issues such as sidewalks with no curb cuts that impede wheelchair users’ mobility but can range from issues of stigma connected to disability to the rejection of neurodiversity. There is a great deal of interest in the field in intersectionality, and the cross-cutting currents of disability, gender, race, sexuality, and class, all of which manifest at both the social and individual level. Part of this interest is a growing awareness of disability in the Global South. While disability studies often focuses on individuals and institutions, Deaf studies frequently centers around language and community issues. Seminal works in Deaf studies were linguistic descriptions of American Sign Language and other sign languages around the world. Each sign language was seen as a core part of the culture of what are often tight-knit communities brought together by common schooling, common experiences of discrimination, and a strong sense of history. There is interest in the field in both intracultural variation and intercultural variation, looking at Deaf cultures around the world. More recently, authors have also begun to focus on phenomenology and ontological issues. Note: Language within both disability studies and Deaf studies is contentious and differs according to scholarly community and author. This article uses the singular term “disability” when referring to disability studies or the concept of disability but the plural when referring to “people with disabilities.” This article also uses the capital version “Deaf” as a default, but some authors use other forms including “deaf” generally or distinguishing between “deaf individuals with hearing loss” and “Deaf culture.” Another form sometimes used is d/Deaf, which refers to both hearing loss and culture. Usage in all bibliographic entries attempts to follow that of the authors.
Literature Reviews and Encyclopedias
There is some overlap between disability studies overviews and Deaf studies overviews, but most are distinct, so they are presented separately here.
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Article
- Africa, Anthropology of
- Aging
- Agriculture
- Animal Ritual
- Animal Sanctuaries
- Anorexia Nervosa
- Anthropocene, The
- Anthropological Activism and Visual Ethnography
- Anthropology and Education
- Anthropology and Theology
- Anthropology of Islam
- Anthropology of Kurdistan
- Anthropology of the Senses
- Anthrozoology
- Antiquity, Ethnography in
- Applied Anthropology
- Archaeobotany
- Archaeological Education
- Archaeology
- Archaeology and Museums
- Archaeology and Political Evolution
- Archaeology and Race
- Archaeology and the Body
- Archaeology, Gender and
- Archaeology, Global
- Archaeology, Historical
- Archaeology, Indigenous
- Archaeology of Childhood
- Archaeology of the Senses
- Archives
- Art Museums
- Art/Aesthetics
- Autoethnography
- Bakhtin, Mikhail
- Bass, William M.
- Beauty
- Belief
- Benedict, Ruth
- Binford, Lewis
- Bioarchaeology
- Biocultural Anthropology
- Bioethics
- Biological and Physical Anthropology
- Biological Citizenship
- Boas, Franz
- Bone Histology
- Bureaucracy
- Business Anthropology
- Capitalism
- Cargo Cults
- Caribbean
- Caste
- Charles Sanders Peirce and Anthropological Theory
- Childhood Studies
- Christianity, Anthropology of
- Citizenship
- Clinical Trials
- Cobb, William Montague
- Code-switching and Multilingualism
- Cognitive Anthropology
- Cole, Johnnetta
- Colonialism
- Commodities
- Consumerism
- Cultural Heritage Presentation and Interpretation
- Cultural Heritage, Race and
- Cultural Materialism
- Cultural Relativism
- Cultural Resource Management
- Culture
- Culture and Personality
- Culture, Popular
- Curatorship
- Cyber-Archaeology
- Dalit Studies
- Dance Ethnography
- de Heusch, Luc
- Deaccessioning
- Design
- Design, Anthropology and
- Diaspora
- Digital Anthropology
- Disability and Deaf Studies and Anthropology
- Douglas, Mary
- Drake, St. Clair
- Dreaming
- Durkheim and the Anthropology of Religion
- Economic Anthropology
- Embodied/Virtual Environments
- Embodiment
- Emotion, Anthropology of
- Environmental Anthropology
- Environmental Justice and Indigeneity
- Ethics
- Ethnoarchaeology
- Ethnocentrism
- Ethnographic Documentary Production
- Ethnographic Films from Iran
- Ethnography
- Ethnography Apps and Games
- Ethnohistory and Historical Ethnography
- Ethnomusicology
- Ethnoscience
- Europe
- Evans-Pritchard, E. E.
- Evolution, Cultural
- Evolutionary Cognitive Archaeology
- Evolutionary Theory
- Experimental Archaeology
- Federal Indian Law
- Feminist Anthropology
- Film, Ethnographic
- Folklore
- Food
- Forensic Anthropology
- Francophonie
- Frazer, Sir James George
- Geertz, Clifford
- Gender
- Gender and Religion
- Gene Flow
- Genetics
- Genocide
- GIS and Archaeology
- Global Health
- Globalization
- Gluckman, Max
- Graphic Anthropology
- Grass
- Healing and Religion
- Health and Social Stratification
- Health Policy, Anthropology of
- Heritage Language
- HIV/AIDS
- House Museums
- Human Adaptability
- Human Evolution
- Human Rights
- Human Rights Films
- Humanistic Anthropology
- Hurston, Zora Neale
- Identity
- Identity Politics
- Indigeneity
- Indigenous Economic Development
- Industrial Archaeology
- Institutions
- Interpretive Anthropology
- Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity
- Kinship
- Laboratories
- Language and Emotion
- Language and Law
- Language and Media
- Language and Race
- Language and Urban Place
- Language Contact and its Sociocultural Contexts, Anthropol...
- Language Ideology
- Language Socialization
- Leakey, Louis
- Legal Anthropology
- Legal Pluralism
- Liberalism, Anthropology of
- Linguistic Anthropology
- Linguistic Relativity
- Linguistics, Historical
- Literacy
- Literary Anthropology
- Lévi-Strauss, Claude
- Magic
- Malinowski, Bronisław
- Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Visual Anthropology
- Maritime Archaeology
- Marriage
- Material Culture
- Materiality
- Mathematical Anthropology
- Matriarchal Studies
- Mead, Margaret
- Media Anthropology
- Medical Anthropology
- Medical Technology and Technique
- Mediterranean
- Memory
- Mendel, Gregor
- Mental Health and Illness
- Mesoamerican Archaeology
- Mexican Migration to the United States
- Migration
- Militarism, Anthropology and
- Missionization
- Mobility
- Modernity
- Morgan, Lewis Henry
- Multispecies Ethnography
- Museum Anthropology
- Museum Education
- Museum Studies
- Myth
- NAGPRA and Repatriation of Native American Human Remains a...
- Narrative in Sociocultural Studies of Language
- Nationalism
- Needham, Rodney
- Neoliberalism
- NGOs, Anthropology of
- Niche Construction
- Northwest Coast, The
- Oceania, Archaeology of
- Paleolithic Art
- Paleontology
- Performance Studies
- Performativity
- Personhood
- Perspectivism
- Philosophy of Museums
- Pilgrimage
- Plantations
- Political Anthropology
- Postprocessual Archaeology
- Postsocialism
- Poverty, Culture of
- Primatology
- Primitivism and Race in Ethnographic Film: A Decolonial Re...
- Processual Archaeology
- Psycholinguistics
- Psychological Anthropology
- Public Archaeology
- Public Sociocultural Anthropologies
- Race
- Religion
- Religion and Post-Socialism
- Religious Conversion
- Repatriation
- Reproductive and Maternal Health in Anthropology
- Reproductive Technologies
- Rhetoric Culture Theory
- Rural Anthropology
- Sahlins, Marshall
- Sapir, Edward
- Scandinavia
- Science Studies
- Secularization
- Semiotics
- Settler Colonialism
- Sex Estimation
- Sexuality
- Shamanism
- Skeletal Age Estimation
- Social Anthropology (British Tradition)
- Social Movements
- Socialization
- Society for Visual Anthropology, History of
- Socio-Cultural Approaches to the Anthropology of Reproduct...
- Sociolinguistics
- Sound Ethnography
- Space and Place
- Stable Isotopes
- Stan Brakhage and Ethnographic Praxis
- Structuralism
- Sub-Saharan Africa, Democracy in
- Surrealism and Anthropology
- Technological Organization
- Tourism
- Trans Studies in Anthroplogy
- Transnationalism
- Tree-Ring Dating
- Turner, Edith L. B.
- Turner, Victor
- Urban Anthropology
- Value
- Violence
- Virtual Ethnography
- Visual Anthropology
- Whorfian Hypothesis
- Willey, Gordon
- Witchcraft
- Wolf, Eric R.
- Writing Culture
- Youth Culture
- Zora Neale Hurston and Visual Anthropology