Joshua O. Reno's "Home Signs"

Joshua O. Reno is professor and graduate director of anthropology at Binghamton University. He is the author of several books, including Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness and, with Britt Halvorson, Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest.

Reno applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Home Signs: An Ethnography of Life beyond and beside Language and reported the following:

My latest book is about the subtle ways that we all communicate with those closest to us using facial expressions, gestures, bodily movement and contact, that is, without words. The passage that concerns me here is from the third chapter, which is the only one in the book that appeared previously, twelve years ago in fact, as a standalone article.

Like that article and like all the other chapters of this book, page 99 focuses a lot on my non-verbal son, Charlie. Charlie was diagnosed on the autism spectrum years ago and non-verbal communication is all that he has, so he offers a useful case study of how much we can do without language. Nearly one hundred pages in, and I am explaining how attempts to get him to use language have failed over the years (twelve years ago and in the present day). I describe one method in particular, known as PECS, which is a method specifically designed by speech and language therapists to get people like him to learn to exchange words (in the form of symbols) for things they want. But from another point of view this is not just an example about how incapable Charlie is of using words. Rather, it shows how well he can assert and express himself:

Sometimes Charlie would push the PECS folder away, a home sign for “I don’t want to do this now.” Sometimes he would decide not to eat at all when he would see it near his food, a sign that he was defying the exercise even if it meant starving himself for that moment. But Charlie’s most common way of defying the exercise, then and now, is to look away while grabbing symbols or tapping icons on a screen. If he did this over and over again, even if I moved the symbols around, eventually he’d get food out of it.... From our perspective, he was too good even then at home signing, at expressing his intentions and modifying interactions without symbols, to the extent that he could work around them if need be.

In that sense, at least, on page 99 readers will encounter something that they have witnessed already for several chapters -- a purportedly “disabled” communicator capably controlling situations and making his intentions known to those around him. Charlie may not do what his teachers and parents want, may refuse to communicate in socially prescribed ways, but in so doing he shows us all that he is neither hapless nor helpless simply because he lives now, and likely will live for his whole life, beyond and beside language.

Learn more about Home Signs at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Waste Away.

The Page 99 Test: Military Waste.

--Marshal Zeringue