E. Mara Green

E. Mara Green

Research Interests

Research Concentrations

deaf anthropology, disability, emergent language, interaction, linguistic anthropology, Nepal, ordinary ethics, semiotics, signed languages, South Asia

Regions

Nepal; South Asia; inter/transnational deaf spaces

Biography

Green is a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist interested in everyday interaction as a locus for the reproduction and transformation of sociality and relationality. Her research has focused primarily on deaf people’s communicative and social practices, with more recent attention to queer and trans people’s language practices. Her courses span anthropological theory, South Asian anthropology, deaf and disability anthropology, and linguistic anthropology.

Fundamentally, Green asks what it means, and what it takes, to understand and be understood by others. This question has emerged through fieldwork both in international deaf spaces and, for more sustained periods of time, in Nepal. With regards to the former, she has argued that International Sign as a mode of signed communication is characterized as much by participants’ moral orientation toward linguistic commensuration across difference as by the affordances of visual signing.

In Nepal, she works with deaf people who use Nepali Sign Language - NSL, a young, conventional language - as well as with deaf and hearing people who use natural sign, which she analyzes as emergent language. Natural sign draws on a small repertoire of conventional forms and strategies and on the immanence of signs in the convergence of bodies and the socio-material world. In using the phrase natural sign (a term translated from NSL) and in her writing more generally, Green seeks to acknowledge her indebtedness to deaf NSL signers’ theories of language and sociality. 

Across her articles and book (Making Sense: Language, Ethics, and Understanding in Deaf Nepal, UC Press 2024), Green shows that making meaning together depends as much on mutual willingness to do so as on shared linguistic and other semiotic resources. This work draws attention to the creativity and vulnerability of deaf signers who are not part of robust signing networks, and argues that conventional grammar performs ethical labor on its users’ behalf.

Green’s next projects focus on deaf NSL signers’ experiences as parents, and on queer and trans Nepalis’ communicative practices across different settings, languages, and modalities.

Methodologically, her research incorporates short- and long-term participant observation, video recordings of interactions, interviews, and (on occasion) linguistic elicitation. She is also an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy, and welcomes recommendations.

Education

University of California, Berkeley, PhD in Anthropology, 2014

Book

2024. Making Sense: Language, Ethics, and Understanding in Deaf Nepal. University of California Press. 

Journal articles

2022. “The Eye and the Other: Language and Ethics in Deaf Nepal.” American Anthropologist 124(1):21-38.

2022. “Thinking with Signs: Caste, Ethnicity, and the Dual Body in Contemporary Eastern Nepal.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 45(3):440-455.

2017. “Performing Gesture: The Pragmatic Functions of Pantomimic and Lexical Repertoires in a Natural Sign Narrative.” Gesture 16, no. 2: 328-362.

2014. “Building the Tower of Babel: International Sign, Linguistic Commensuration, and Moral Orientation.” Language in Society 43, no. 4: 445-465.

Book chapter

2015. “One Language, or Maybe Two: Direct Communication, Understanding, and Informal Interpreting in International Deaf Encounters.” In It’s a Small World: International Deaf Spaces and Encounters, edited by M. Friedner and A. Kusters, 70-82. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. 

Co-edited volume

2020. With A. Kusters, E. Moriarty, and K. Snoddon. Sign Language Ideologies in Practice  Mouton de Gruyter Press/Ishara Press.

Co-authored pieces

2020. With A. Kusters, E. Moriarty, and K. Snoddon. “Sign Language Ideologies: Practices and Politics” . In Sign Language Ideologies in Practice, ed. M. Green, A. Kusters, E. Moriarty, and K. Snoddon. Mouton de Gruyter/Ishara Press. Pp. 3-22

2016. With M. Friedner and A Kusters. “Deaf Community: Southern Asia.” In The Deaf Studies Encyclopedia, edited by G. Gertz and P. Boudreault, 55-58. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc.

2016. With M. Morgan. “Sign Language: Southern Asia.” In The Deaf Studies Encyclopedia, edited by G. Gertz and P. Boudreault, 815-817. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc.

2022. “The Eye and the Other: Language and Ethics in Deaf Nepal.” American Anthropologist  124(1):21-38. 

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