Culture and deafness in a Maya Indian village

Over the years, the question of psychosocial adjustment among the deaf has attracted a great deal of attention. Pioneer work by Levine (1960, 1963); Rainer, Altshuler, and Kallmann (1963); Myklebust (1964); Rainer and Altshuler (1968); Grinker (1969); Mindel and Vernon (1971); and Schlesinger and Meadow (1972), to mention but a few, has aided our understanding of how the deaf adjust to the stress which their handicap imposes upon them. We know a great deal less, however, about the deaf in other societies. Altable (1947); Altshuler, Vollenweider, and Rainer (1971); Youniss (1974); and Sarfaty and Katz (1978) are among the handful of references which appear, and they all deal with urban populations. Kuschel (1973) considers a single deaf man on Rennell Island, in Polynesia, but his concern is primarily the sign language devised by this ingenious man. As far as I am aware, only Woodward (1978) and his associates have an ongoing program for the investigation of deafness in a nonurban society (Washabaugh, Woodward, and DeSantis, 1978). To neglect the way in which other societies handle these problems is to deprive ourselves of a rich source of comparative data. It is also to avoid a strenuous challenge, for the methodology that is appropriate for use in literate, urban societies may have little applicability in a tribal or peasant group. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to present preliminary data on a group of profoundly, congenitally deaf Maya Indians of southeastern Mexico, with the aim of suggesting hypotheses which may be investigated by future research. The fieldwork upon which the report is based, however, was not part of a purposeful attempt to study the deaf of the village in question; rather, the village was selected as part of the Maya Film Project, directed by Hubert Smith, and at the time the project took to the field the fieldworkers had no idea that the village eventually chosen would contain a high number of deaf inhabitants.