232 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning
from the capacity to dispose of the future as though it were the present, that
is, the enormous and truly miraculous enlargement of the very dimension in
which power can be effective. (Hannah Arendt, quoted by Mowles, cited in
Crewe & Axelby, 2013, p. 220)plans were made to continue organizing gatherings in a central town to facilitate
agreement on priorities, with people paying for their own transport and organiz-
ing help with lodging. This brings us into the space between talking and doing, as
Crewe and Axelby (2013) describe:it is in the incongruities between belief and practice and between past, pres-
ent and future that we experience the emotion, performance and spectacles
of politics. It is in those spaces that we know alienation, solidarity, fear, hope,
anger, excitement and frustration. To understand more about that is a chal-
lenge for future anthropologists. (p. 220)THE TREE AND THE AFRICAN MAMA: NEW CONCEpTS
OF DEVELOpMENT FORMED “IN THE WILD,” ENTANGLED
IN EMOTIONAL GEOGRApHIES AND DIVERSE TRAJECTORIES
The formation of the African mama and tree metaphors as indigenous notions
of deaf flourishing can be viewed as illustrations of what Engeström and Sannino
(2012) call “concept formation in the wild.” They refer to the book Cognition From
the Wild by Hutchins (1995), in which this construct signifies “human cognition
in its natural habitat—that is, naturally occurring, culturally constituted human
activity” (p. 205).
Hutchins contrasts this notion with lab-based studies of cognition: “I hope to
evoke with this metaphor a sense of ecology of thinking in which human cognition
interacts with an environment rich in organizing resources” (1995, pp. viii–xiv).
Engeström and Sannino (2012) notice that boundaries between “the wild” and
“captivity” may be fluid: “For us, ‘in the wild’ refers to the fact that the constraints
are never complete. In other words, human cognition and action are never fully
predictable or programmable.” (p. 26)
Hutchins (2012, p. 315) notes that “concepts in the wild are manifest in prac-
tices, and practices include social and material settings in which they are situated.”
This implies that “when concepts are manifest in cultural practices, conceptual
processes, including concept formation, can be directly observed, recorded, and
studied” (pp. 315–316). In this section, I expand the above exploration of how deaf
development notions are formed within culturally situated practices.
In Chapter 5, I describe the emotional geography of the Cameroonian commu-
nity, with members moving between hope and despair. This process of moving be-
tween these two poles can be placed in a broader view on “development” in Africa,
entangled in colonialism, modernity, and “post-development” (also see Ferguson,
2008), as is conceptualized in Readings in Modernity in Africa (Geschiere, pels, &
Meyer, 2008, p. 2):