This chapter examines how the nature/culture binary imposes particular qualities on water, which water is then sometimes imagined to overflow. In asking after water this way, the chapter retools the historian of science Peter Galison's notion of a “theory machine,” an object in the world that stimulates a theoretical formulation. According to Galison, networks of electrocoordinated clocks in European railway stations at the turn of the twentieth-century aided Albert Einstein's thinking about simultaneity. The chapter considers how water has operated as a theory machine in anthropology, how it has been framed by nature/culture, and how it has in turn reframed nature/culture. It also discusses seawater imagery and metaphors in early ethnography, in maritime anthropology, and in recent social theory. It argues that seawater has moved from an implicit to an explicit figure for anthropological and social theorizing, especially in the age of globalization, which it also terms “oceanization.”

This article ethnographically explores how and why deaf workers are hired in new Indian coffee shop chains. Arguing that such workers produce added value for the corporations that hire them, hearing coworkers, and customers who frequent these outlets, this article also explores the ambivalence that deaf workers feel about such employment “opportunities.” As a result of the decline in public‐sector employment, the private sector has become a new site of disability employment, and nongovernmental organizations and vocational training centers have been created to train and place disabled workers in the private sector. In the process of such training and placement, these institutions create “workers with disabilities” as a category. Through participant observation, interviews, and literature review, this article explores how this category is produced and what its effects and affects are.

[abs]Sound studies and Deaf studies may seem at first impression to operate in worlds apart. We argue in this article, however, that similar renderings of hearing, deafness, and seeing as ideal types -and as often essentialized sensory modes -make it possible to read differences between Sound studies and Deaf studies as sites of possible articulation. We direct attention to four zones of productive overlap, attending to how sound is inferred in deaf and Deaf practice, how reimagining sound in the register of low-frequency vibration can upend deafhearing dichotomies, how "deaf futurists" champion cyborg sound, and how signing and other non-spoken communicative practices might undo phonocentric models of speech. Sound studies and Deaf studies emerge as fields with much to offer one another epistemologically, theoretically, and practically.

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Deaf anthropology is a field that exists in conversation with but is not reducible to the interdisciplinary field of deaf studies. Deaf anthropology is predicated upon a commitment to understanding deafnesses across time and space while holding on to “deaf” as a category that does something socially, politically, morally, and methodologically. In doing so, deaf anthropology moves beyond compartmentalizing the body, the senses, and disciplinary boundaries. We analyze the close relationship between anthropology writ large and deaf studies: Deaf studies scholars have found analytics and categories from anthropology, such as the concept of culture, to be productive in analyzing deaf peoples’ experiences and the sociocultural meanings of deafness. As we note, however, scholarship on deaf peoples’ experiences is increasingly variegated. This review is arranged into four overlapping sections titled Socialities and Similitudes; Mobilities, Spaces, and Networks; Modalities and the Sensorium; and Technologies and Futures. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 49 is October 21, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

This article ethnographically analyses how groups (and not just individuals) are produced in business process outsourcing (BPO) workplaces. In order to mitigate an unstable labour pool, corporations hire deaf workers to perform identical BPO work regardless of their qualifications and backgrounds. These hiring practices serve to cement existing relationships and produce deaf workers as a group marked only by deafness. This article explores how engaging in the same work articulates with deaf young adults' 'sameness work' to produce ambivalent deaf groups. It also analyses the everyday practices of deaf employees, their relationships with their normal co-workers who 'love' them, and the ways that value is reconfigured in the workplace through the existence of disabled workers. This article argues that in contrast to dominant representations of disabled people as unemployable, the (re)inscription of deafness as a source of multiple forms of value begs for a broader analysis of the role of disability in late capitalism. Producing the deaf groupIn September 2008, I visited Excel, a mid-sized business process outsourcing (BPO) corporation in Bangalore, India. 1 Excel was unique in that at least 95 per cent of its approximately one hundred and fifty employees at that time were disabled and many of them were deaf. Excel has since expanded and now employs over two hundred people, of whom at least two-thirds have disabilities. While conducting ethnographic research with sign language-using deaf young adults in Bangalore and other Indian cities, I had learned much about Excel from deaf young adults who were currently working there or who had previously worked there, from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and job placement organization administrators, and from popular newspaper articles extolling its innovative model of providing BPO services; its innovation in hiring disabled employees was stressed.

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[abs]Sound studies and Deaf studies may seem at first impression to operate in worlds apart. We argue in this article, however, that similar renderings of hearing, deafness, and seeing as ideal types -and as often essentialized sensory modes -make it possible to read differences between Sound studies and Deaf studies as sites of possible articulation. We direct attention to four zones of productive overlap, attending to how sound is inferred in deaf and Deaf practice, how reimagining sound in the register of low-frequency vibration can upend deafhearing dichotomies, how "deaf futurists" champion cyborg sound, and how signing and other non-spoken communicative practices might undo phonocentric models of speech. Sound studies and Deaf studies emerge as fields with much to offer one another epistemologically, theoretically, and practically.