Figure (of Personhood) Drawing: Scaffolding Signing and Signers in Nepal

Abstract

This article explores how the affordances of pictorial representations of sign language forms (as enacted by illustrated signers) impact institutional processes of enskillment to sign language use. First, I attend to the participation framework roles such images inhabit in processes through which deaf teachers work to socialize novice signers to control the viewpoint reversals fundamental to local signing practices. I then explore how novice signers' participant roles in relation to these images shift as they transition from animating the pictorially represented signs to performing them in ways aimed at yielding identification with the portrayed figures of personhood. Finally, through an analysis of a pictorially illustrated Nepali Sign Language version of Nepal's new national anthem, I show how the particulars of such figures have shifted in response to dramatic political changes following Nepal's Maoist Civil War.

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Publication Date

1-1-2020

Publication Title

Signs and Society

Department

Anthropology

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.1086/706770

Keywords

Language, Affordances, Registers, Politics, Texts, Real

Language

English

Format

text

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