Into the map: The re-enactment of experience in sign languages’ representation of places of origin

Abstract

unbridgeable distance. This dialogue between immersion chapter argues that the drawings collected in this study are constructed around a dialogue between a situated experience, realized by moving through a familiar space, and the representation of that experience which illuminates its objects even from an unbridgeable distance. This dialogue between immersion and distance – a theoretical cornerstone of our whole work–will be analyzed not only with regard to the spatial perspective chosen in the drawings, but also in the use of signing space in sign languages. When recounting the spaces they have drawn, signers have consistently changed their point of view: from a map-like description realized using their hands in order to describe spaces from above, to the adoption of a perspective from the inside in which the signers’ whole body becomes the vehicle for signification. In particular, this change of viewpoint is at times realized through the so-called Role Shift, with which the signer adopts a first-person perspective internal to the event narrated. This spatial and enunciative shift allows the signer to interpret the role of himself once again: in this way, he re-enacts an agency directly performed in the places represented in the maps, retranslating them as a subjective experience.