Making sense: Language, ethics, and understanding in deaf Nepal By E.Mara Green, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 2024. pp. 240

Mara Green opens her monograph, “Making Sense,” with a short vignette: a deaf woman in a village in eastern Nepal attempts to make an invitation to another woman to come to her house for tea. The latter woman, who, whether because of lack of understanding or an unwillingness to engage with the deaf woman, turns away, saying she does not understand even as she refuses to look at the deaf woman. Green and her reader are left asking themselves: was this simply a misunderstanding or a willful refusal of another person's way of being in the world? Green reminds her readers, “All language users experience the possibility of being misunderstood, not-understood, or even ignored” (3) before, drawing on time spent in Nepal with deaf and hearing people, leading us through her own process of witnessing “what it means to communicate when understanding and being understood are radically contingent and persistently in question” (Green, 3). Throughout the book, Green is guided by a variety of people, particularly a deaf, Nepali Sign Language (NSL) teacher named Sagar Karki. His classes and the deaf sociality they facilitate open up to Green the dynamics and ethics of translanguaging between spoken Nepali, NSL, and what is named “Natural Sign.” The text is rich, deeply and thoroughly-cited and thoughtfully-narrated. It covers a tremendous amount of scholarship, including Deaf histories; Deaf and Disability studies literature; Sign Language and spoken language linguistics; features that constitute emergent sign languages; and the anthropology of ethics. It is in the latter space, I believe, that Green does her finest work; through the care she shows in each ethnographic detail, she underlines the argument she is making: to listen, learn, and think with other people is to acknowledge and value them, in this case foregrounding deaf and hearing interlocutors in the villages of Maunabudhuk and Bodhe and their surrounds in Eastern Nepal. As Green highlights throughout, this kind of acknowledgement relies on common aims, affordances, and context, but also a choice to ensure the other person is truly listened to, helping the reader to think through why this choice might not always be readily made. In Chapter 1, Green artfully unpacks the ways in which language and sociality are understood between deaf and deaf persons, introducing how this differs from hearing and deaf interactions by using the example of “lāṭo”—a pejorative way of saying “deaf,” defined as “deficient” or “dumb” in spoken-written Nepali. Through the various connotations and applications of “lāṭo,” Green reveals power dynamics inherent in language usage, whether spoken Nepali, NSL, or what Nepali people refer to as “natural sign,” which “involves a small repertoire of widely available, shared signs complemented by strategies that make use of the body's capacity to point to and mimetically represent places, people, movements, objects, and other elements of the social world” (2). She unfurls the unique ways in which deaf people in Nepal resist the pejorative lāṭo label through deaf-centered codes of behavior that incorporate language, learned habits of Nepali social behaviors, and the inculcation of a sense of collective responsibility toward oneself and other deaf people who need support, whether pedagogical or for practical living or both. Green explores the ways in which modifiers such as “deaf” and “hearing” are slippery in conversations about identity in this part of Nepal. The concepts change shape depending upon their use, from deaf-hearing being sensory positions to a sense of personhood and deaf identity. “Deaf School,” a moniker that indicates both institutional schools and also signifies singular Deaf-centered sign language learning classes, emerges as a key locus of the development of deaf sociality alongside its formal language tuition function. In one instance, Sagar Karki broaches these ideas together by asking his students, “can you talk on a phone?” (65) in order to explain that if yes, they are hearing, and if no, they are deaf. This creates confusion when one student, who presents as sensorially deaf, initially defines herself as both deaf and hearing, because she both signs and speaks. Natural sign, because it is used at home and in the villages, is acknowledged in the classes and beyond as a shared capacity through which students are already able to communicate. It thus becomes the means through which such questions about personhood are negotiated and also the means through which NSL is introduced and explained in Sagar Karki's classes or less formally for Green in her interactions with interlocutors. Green argues that unlike most spoken Nepali language-learning which occurs from infancy and among kin, NSL learning in schools represents for deaf people their first formal language acquisition, and these sessions are thus also formative of self-understanding, origin narratives, and a burgeoning sense of deaf collectivity. Deaf language learning experiences therefore become part of both individual narratives and collective narratives that deaf people share with one another. Spaces beyond schooling where deaf sociality can be cultivated are especially precious because they are rare in the local area, for example, a local bakery chain that regularly hires deaf waiters and provides a space of sign language use as well as deaf-hearing interactions, becoming DEAF SPACE (sensu Gulliver, 2006) by virtue of the recognized value of sign language and deaf ways of being in these places. The schools and bakery, Green explains, become hubs that “produce language not only because of the number of deaf people present but also because of their desire and willingness to make sense to and of each other” (29). Given that the area where Green conducted her research does not have “dense clusters of deaf relatives and neighbors […] natural sign is not the communicative medium of a tightly connected group of people with a consistent need and desire to sign” (81). Spaces for signing and understanding become all the more precious, because Green points out that they require a willingness to engage in deaf language, something that not all local people are wont to do. Listening and learning emerge as ethical choices that people make about and with one another, with those people who believe in ideas of deaf as “lāṭo” as less-than and lacking, a position that is shown to be held by both hearing and deaf people. Green's interlocutor, Prajwal, demonstrates how this creates the imperative that deaf people show care to one another so that they have the ability to become their best and most capable selves, using the example of his relationship with his friend. When the latter was younger, people assumed he was intellectually incapable because he was deaf. Green unpacks this carefully as a form of what Graif (2018, 9, 40) calls “misrecognition.” Prajwal recounts that his friend required guidance in terms of communication and social norms in order to be part of the surrounding society but was not taught them because his family did not believe he was capable, describing him as “lāṭo.” Prajwal explains that this is the reason that in deaf social worlds in Nepal, deaf people recognize the need to be responsible for taking care of each other, mentoring one another, and supporting each other's autonomy. Green maps the challenges Nepalese deaf people encounter throughout their lives, attempting to piece together why these challenges occur. One quotidian example, which mirrors the first vignette in the book, exposits the way a young hearing woman working in a shop disregards a deaf woman's order of a particular kind of shirt. Despite another worker in the shop finding the order entirely clear, the younger woman insists she cannot understand. Green raises the question of what is going on: is this a genuine lack of understanding or a refusal to engage because of prejudice? Green shows the reader why context and affordances of language beyond the language itself are of equal importance by explaining several situations where she herself, despite doggedly trying to understand what she was being told, struggled and failed to understand. In one case, her partner, who had much less signing ability, grasped much more quickly the reference to a pomegranate. In another example, Green and a young man attempt (and fail) to fully grasp the story told by the young man's mother. Parts appear intelligible only to the young man because of his prior knowledge of family stories, but in other moments both he and Green seem mystified, while in yet another he claims to not understand when Green seems to believe he might not want to recount this element in his translation, and not understanding is a way out. In one of the most memorable exchanges in the book, Green misinterprets a sign for lentils as millet or rice. Sagar rejoins: “Well, do you habitually plant lentils?” Green quotes from her notes: “Good point, practically and theoretically” (85). Through this exchange, Green launches into the values of contextual and affordance-based elements, which allow or disallow understanding of an unknown sign and are as important as the sign itself, calling on Schutz's (1970) “zones of relevance” (103) to unpack this further. This leads Green to consider, because deaf signers are not always included in the communicative moment by hearers and cannot fully rely on those around them lest they omit spoken pieces of information or miss signed elements by removing their gaze, whether deaf signers may approach communication with suspicion or at least skepticism. Here, Green considers “Tok Bahadur's point that deaf people may very reasonably encounter the world with suspicion is worth considering, especially in concert with NSL signers’ insistence that it is within hearing people's capacities to ­ communicate with deaf people, and yet hearing people often choose not to” (148). Here we are led again to consider the ordinary ethics of chosen communicative action within this context. Making Sense is a “thick” book: yes, in terms of its content density with citations at times head-spinning in their number, but “thick” is really meant here in the truest anthropological sense. It describes from multiple angles and makes strange concepts that upon first view might seem simple and even dispensable, when they are in fact the very heart of the matter. This is the case for that single word—“lāṭo”—which proves to be a four-letter universe of rejection, exclusion, misrepresentation, lack of recognition, unseeingness, ignorance, and epistemic injustice, but which also, ultimately, gives rise to ethical codes that hasten development of deaf collectivity, inclusion, and broader understanding across both Green's interlocutors and her readers. It took me multiple reads to really grasp the nuances of this part of Green's contribution, but this is a testament to the care and depth Green has executed throughout. It is important reading for those interested in sign language socialities and deafness, but so too for scholars of communication, ethics, decolonization, and inclusive epistemic practices.