Home Signs: New book explores human connection beyond language

The slap of a palm against a surface. A hug, a hand pulled in a certain direction, a subtle sideways glance: Charlie cannot speak or understand language, but he communicates constantly with the world around him.

In his new book Home Signs: An Ethnography of Life Beyond and Beside Language, Binghamton University Professor of Anthropology Joshua Reno draws on his relationship with his nonverbal teenage son and how it has shaped and transformed his understanding of human closeness and communication. The book combines portraits of family life and interviews with other caregivers, challenging the reader’s assumptions about the realities of disability and human connection.

Charlie, who is on the autism spectrum, cannot speak or understand language. Instead, he communicates with the people around him using gestures known as “home signs,” a term from deaf culture. A deaf child born to hearing parents may not learn sign language right away, but instead come up with other ways to communicate with their family — hence, home signs, Reno explained.

“The last time we heard him speak any words that were quite clearly words was when he was about a year and a half,” Reno remembered.

Brown bear, the subject of a book they once read together. Shoe. Single syllables — there and then forever gone, a common regression for children diagnosed with autism.

Reno is matter-of-fact about Charlie’s future: He’ll never have a normal human life, as we commonly define it. An only child, he won’t get married or have his own children, argue about politics, cast a vote, go to college or hold down a job. He won’t take care of his parents when they get old and will, instead, be taken care of himself, likely in a group home setting.

“He doesn’t know what politics are or what democracy is. Any job he could have without the ability to read or write or understand language would be a form of indentured servitude because he can’t agree to a labor contract,” Reno said.

In the 1970s, Charlie likely would have been sent to a New York City institution; places such as these were later exposed for treating people with intellectual and learning disabilities as if they were subhuman, Reno said. The viewing of nonverbal or disabled individuals as unworthy of human life comes up in personal and political discourse to this day.

As a caregiver, Reno chooses instead to focus on what Charlie actually does rather than what he will never do — and on his inherent worth, something too often erased in a culture that equates worth with paid employment and facility with language.

“One way to look at it is that Charlie is training the people around him to be better communicators with each other,” Reno said. “He makes all of us better people, starting with me, and we’re lucky to have him in our lives.”

Communicating without speech

Home signs typically communicate relationships. An example is hugging, a gesture that isn’t explicitly taught but which naturally emerges as a way to express care, affection, closeness or sympathy, Reno said.

One of Charlie’s idiosyncratic home signs involves slapping a surface next to him, expressing messages such as “pay attention to me” or “stop what you’re doing.” He might use it when a visitor insists on speaking for him, filling up his language deficit with their own words — none of which he understands.

“It’s a typical strategy people use with babies, puppies, kittens and plants. We do it with non-verbal beings around us; we speak for them constantly,” Reno said.

Although the intent is often well-meaning, non-verbal people can find this strategy distressing, just as a verbal person would if visitors insisted on talking to them in a foreign language they didn’t understand.

Professional caregivers become experts in home signs. They are a crucial form of communication even for individuals with verbal ability; sometimes, language can be limited and not convey needed information, Reno said. Think of a loved one verbally insisting that they’re fine when they need someone to sit beside them in sympathy.

Reno points out that academics are obsessed with words and language; as a result, disciplines such as anthropology have often ignored non-verbal individuals — and not just people on the autism spectrum or with developmental disabilities. Nonverbal populations also include infants, individuals with traumatic brain injuries and the elderly.

“The fact is, all of us start life without language, and many of us will end life without language. But anthropologists, linguists and other social scientists are obsessed with language, how special and different it is, and how it makes us different than gorillas or australopithecines,” Reno said. “We make it the measure of humanity, which I find intellectually frustrating and politically and ethically troubling because it is part and parcel of the exclusion of people like my son from society and their marginalization.”

Nonverbal communication systems such as home signs can benefit verbal people, too; after all, our linguistic abilities aren’t guaranteed to last our entire lives, he said.

“The main lesson from anthropology is that being a person means having relationships, and relationships are important to everyone, including people with different needs,” Reno said. “We all start life without abilities and will end life without abilities. It’s just that some of us are classified as disabled for our whole lives; the rest of us start that way and end that way.”