Sensory Impairment

Anthropological studies of sensory impairment address biological conditions and cultural disablement while contributing to theoretical discussions of cultural competence, communicative practices, the role of narrative, and features of identity, ideologies, and technology. As boundary cases, impairments can disclose essential aspects of the senses in human life. Sensory impairment studies navigate the complexities of comparing dominant sensory discourses with individual sense differences, cross-linguistic incomparabilities among sense categories, and how impairment categories tend to fuse together highly diverse conditions. The category of disability, which includes sensory impairment, comprises chronic deficit relative to priority competencies. With special emphasis on blindness/visual impairment and deafness/hearing impairment, we overview sensory impairment on three levels: the social partitioning of the sensorium, differential ramifications of sensory impairments cross-culturally, and the classification of the person based on cultural priorities. We identify ten common themes in ethnographically oriented studies.