Being and Hearing: Making Intelligible Worlds in Deaf Kathmandu

How do deaf people in different societies perceive and conceive the world around them? Drawing on four years of anthropological fieldwork in Nepali deaf communities, Being and Hearing shows how questions of cultural difference are profoundly shaped by local habits of perception. Beginning with the premise that philosophy and cultural intuition are separated only by genre and pedigree, Peter Graif argues that Nepali deaf communities—in their social sensibilities, political projects, and aesthetics of expression—present innovative answers to the very old question of what it means to be different.
Being and Hearing makes a unique contribution to ethnography and comparative philosophy.