Home Signs
An Ethnography of Life Beyond and Beside Language
Joshua O. Reno
Having read it
★★★★☆
Top marks for effort and the lives lived, experiences endured and the insights gained from and around its subject, but a bit tough in places being a partially academic reading slog with possibly a few too many details not totally necessary to the narrative (and of which parts I skimmed and even skipped).
However, what it stands for and that it opens up and shows a different communicative world is well worth full marks given it encourages and espouses an all round better and more inclusive societal contract with those not necessarily totally cognitively or linguistically able is worth having and maintaining for the different and humbling perspectives given and gained from greater diversity and inclusion across all levels of society.
Denying that someone is trying to say something, in many instances, is a step toward dehumanising them and making them killable, that is, a step toward denying that they are a someone at all.
A good passage
Home signs reveal social creativity at its most dynamic and improvisational. We are forced to make everything up as we go along, from the simplest exchanges to the deepest emotions. It is exciting, and it is intensely frustrating. If we take as our starting point the substance of actual interactions, rather than semiotic ideologies about what a human is or ought to be, who should or should not have a voice, it becomes clear that improvisational nonverbal communication and interaction is essential, and not only for human beings.45
A second good passage
[...] other people I interviewed for this book, who also say that working with special needs children and adults as an aide (rather than as a program director, nurse, teacher, or therapist), means making very little money, having few benefits, and getting little credit, all while negotiating extremely difficult conditions to develop a shared understanding with clients. To supplement and extend my observations, I include interviews and observations with professional care staff in rural New York, some of whom have worked with us and our son, but most of whom have not. This adds a more in-depth understanding to the context within which the auto-ethnographic interludes occur. This context includes a neoliberal form of governmentality that spans the globe and creates perilous and precarious situations for severely impaired people as well as the workers who care for them professionally. Even in places with ostensibly good options for people with severe impairments, such as New York state or London, neoliberal reregulation serves to routinize contradiction and confusion as ordinary dimensions of everyday life.59
[...]
[...] I consider signs as forceful and force as a kind of sign, irrespective of whether they are (mis)recognised as aggression or violence. I say ‘misrecognised’ since, as the case of Charlie’s pinching shows, it may be that a sign consists of forceful action yet can be interpreted as something other or more than violent. More often, though, the tendency is for those with greater privilege and power over life and death to misconstrue their own actions as merely forceful, not violent, and deny the same privilege for those with less power, whose lives are at stake. In these situations, misunderstanding has potentially dire consequence, where ideological assumptions about kinesics inform systemic and specific instances of ableist and racist violence.
A third good passage
Today, handshakes are nothing less than the kinesic infrastructure of transnational capitalism, the means by which very different people can share a minimal degree of haptic touch so that commodities and cash can do the real relating on their behalf. This might seem about as far from a home sign as one could imagine. Yet, around the world people learn to shake hands in a certain style, which may be more or less formalized. Self-help guides online, for instance, may offer explicit and colorful characterizations of what they consider good or bad handshakes, the value judgments they invite people to make, and the consequences this can have for you in competitive capitalist settings where a good impression can be the difference between making or losing a sale and getting or losing a job.