Understanding deaf communities through narration

Several studies have pointed out the importance of narration and self narration not only in developing linguistic awareness and a sense of belonging but also in the building of identity and community boundaries (Mishler, 2000; Baker, 2004; Bamberg 2004; Goodson, 2001). This is particularly crucial in communities who have been stigmatized for a long time such as the Deaf Community. In fact, only recently, it has been shown that sign languages are another realization of the human faculty of language that exploits a visuo-gestural modality and that they share all the characteristics and complexities of any spoken language. This change of perspective has led to a new vision of the deaf person as a member of a linguistic minority (Woll & Ladd, 2011). The present study has been conducted by a hearing native signer, member of Deaf Community and involves also ten old deaf people in telling the story of their experience of deafness in relation to the hearing majority and to deaf identity. Signed have been collected through the participant observation technique in an informal-familiar setting and have been video-recorded and transcribed. Narrations develop around three main recurrent themes: experience of deafness; relationships with the hearing community; Role and identity building in relation with the two communities. Through diachronic and synchronic navigation identity and sense of community is built out of a narration based on dialectic between sameness and difference within which translation plays a crucial role. Narration and self narration are a bodily mediated and highly interactive process where personal identities, roles and stories are progressively related to liquid social backgrounds at the diachronic and synchronic level. Within such processes participants become aware of how their own linguistic identity has shaped their own life and of their role in the two communities which are always related in terms of continuity/discontinuity (i.e. cultural and practical continuity and linguistic discontinuity). Narration can contribute to identity and ethnographic research only if norms and attitudes and expectations of members of a linguistic minority can be recognized and related to the majority that is in contact with it. In this sense, an endocentric and esocentric approach will be necessary to understand the link between narrative and the identity-building process within and outside the community.