218 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning
Anthropological perspectives suggest not a binary opposition between fixed
and locally rooted understandings but rather a fluid process of mutual inter-
action in which knowledge is continually translated, interpreted and created
in new, hybrid forms. These processes deserve to be given due recognition.
(Crewe & Axelby, 2013, p. 156)This discussion is complementary to the documentation of deaf Cameroonians’
indigenous knowledge in Chapter 5, which also highlights oscillations between
hope and hopelessness, making salient “the emotional geography of development”
(Crewe & Axelby, 2013, p. 1). Crewe and Axelby’s reflections characterize this move-
ment between poles of hope and despair as processes of knowledge exchange and
cross-fertilization:It is in the space between the future and the past, between a hope for
happiness and despair at failure, that the most human aspects of development
can be understood. By participating in the visioning processes, people are
invited to live in the future in their imagination and articulate what they see.
(2013, p. 214)Here I have briefly sketched some sustainability-related challenges for deaf com-
munities in the face of their desire for well-being and dignified lives, that is, “deaf
flourishing” (also see the section in Chapter 7 titled “Toward an Anthropology of
Deaf Flourishing”). Development has been understood as a space at the crossroads
of spontaneity and intervention, which is woven into an emotional geography. The
perspectives and practices of development in non-Western countries can com-
plement theorizing and practice, but they have only recently begun to be docu-
mented. The next section illustrates these abstractions by looking into deaf visions
of the future and metaphors of flourishing articulated in transnational interactions
in Cameroon.DEAF FLOURISHING AS A “CONCEpT FROM THE WILD”
Deaf people’s empowerment and flourishing is depicted in the painting by Jiayi
Zhou, a deaf artist from China, on the cover of this book (Figure 8.1). It expresses
the catalytic influences of deaf people from all over the world, represented by a
globe with various emerging hands set on a staircase. In her book The Spiral Stair-
case, Karen Armstrong (2004) uses the eponymous metaphor to describe her own
spiritual growth (see also Chapter 7). The symbol of the spiral staircase is used in
various cultures to refer to consciousness raising, the attainment of higher cognitive
awareness, or the creation of a new spirituality.
Likewise, one objective of this book is to show where deaf flourishing occurs and
where—and how—it can flower most richly. As discussed in Chapter 1, I approach
deaf flourishing from a perspective of well-being, with an emphasis on the moments
of “becoming” and “blossoming” in which this often resides, rather than from a
modern understanding that views the world against a norm of “development.”