Nurturing Deaf Flourishing Sustainably 241
sustainably address and resolve complex issues while enriching their own emanci-
pation processes.CONCLUSION
Research on deaf communities’ practices and development contexts has only
recently begun. This chapter has aimed to contribute to this process by looking into
metaphors of development that have emerged during transnational interactions
in Cameroon, where progress is still incipient, and during community meetings
in Uganda, where international cooperation has taken place across two decades.
I have explored alternative epistemological, methodological, and theoretical ave-
nues that offer insight into these “concepts from the wild” and have the potential to
valorize practices of deaf indigenous knowledge and learning.
Such documentation and valorization may be particularly treasured in the coming
decades as necessary processes for effective educational practices and development
opportunities, because “by using a community’s assets, including its indigenous
knowledge (e.g., everyday practices, cultures, traditions, rituals, or environment)...
the development of the community can be more fully realised” (Diale & Fritz, 2007,
p. 309). From this perspective, reflection is needed on top-down approaches to de-
velopment, with a more skeptical position on the wholesale transfer of globalized
theoretical notions of deaf culture.
The anthropological and interdisciplinary stance generated throughout the re-
search and in the framework of deaf flourishing is critical and engaged, which re-
sults from moving between diverse contexts and from producing fieldwork ethically
in cooperation with multiple actors:Improvements in development policy and practice require transformations
of power hierarchies and the mechanisms that sustain them. Anthropology is
not enough. But anthropological insight can assist in determining what needs
to be done and give support to those pursuing strategies that are well thought
through and respectful. The problem is not lack of opportunity but that there
is too much to be done. (Crewe & Axelby, 2013, p. 45)This chapter’s exploration of indigenous practices has clearly only scratched the
surface of collective deaf knowledge that is yet to be valorized but that has been
accumulating within the communities of Cameroon and Uganda for generations.
It is an on-going challenge for scholars to identify and investigate the many threads
of expertise residing in these populations, and as Keenan (cited in Crewe & Axelby,
2013, p. 45) points out, this is a task that can perhaps never be satisfactorily com-
pleted: “The question, both as anthropologists and citizens of the world, is not just
whether we did the right thing, but whether we could have done more.”