O trânsito entre culturas na reabilitação auditiva: narrativas autobiográficas da pessoa com surdez

Abstract

In the medical dictionary, the definition of deaf/hearing impaired is the one “who does not hear or hear poorly”. For these people, auditory rehabilitation services are offered by the Unified Health System – SUS, in compliance with ordinances published by the Ministry of Health. The purpose of auditory rehabilitation is to develop or restore the capacity of auditory perception to people with deafness. We argue, however, that people with deafness experience their own culture, as they become involved in processes of meanings conveyed by the use of LIBRAS, which is defined as a set of strategies and social codes used in a standard way, so that the person with deafness can live in a society organized by/for hearing people. When going through the auditory rehabilitation process, a person with congenital deafness transits between their culture and the culture of the listeners and this, in turn, opens up possibilities for new interpersonal and intrapersonal experiences. In the present research, we invest in a discussion about the situation of transit between deaf Cultures and Listening Culture. Our main objective was to investigate how the person with deafness, who is submitted to the auditory rehabilitation process, experiences the transition between deaf culture and hearing culture. This dissertation consists of two manuscripts. In the first manuscript we discussed, from a literature review, the concept of culture in different areas of Psychology. Through this review, we defend that Culture is a process of mediation by signs. As we weave a discussion about Culture in the cases of people with deafness, we are referring to a peculiar form of language exercise, or, in other words, of production, organization and semiotic mediation. In the second manuscript, we describe a field research guided by methodological assumptions of Cultural Psychology. Our objective was to investigate how the person with deafness, who is submitted to the auditory rehabilitation process, experiences the transition between deaf and hearing cultures. In our methodology, we chose a case study of an adult with congenital deafness. Five episodic semi-structured interviews were carried out, mediated by a LIBRAS interpreter. The location of this realization was a hearing rehabilitation center in the city of Maceió-AL. As a general conclusion of this research, we highlight two aspects of the transit between cultures, based on the narratives we analyzed. In the first, we refer to the specificities in the construction of the sense of temporality in the narratives of a person with deafness. We argue that these specificities justify the recognition of a distinct culture given the inseparability of language and culture. Furthermore, a more in-depth analysis of the construction of meanings of temporality in cases of people with deafness supports the assertion that auditory rehabilitation should broaden its focus of action, in order to contemplate more than the teaching of sounds. We emphasize that rehabilitation is not just about the experience with sounds, but, above all, about the transformations in the way other people, institutions, the world are experienced. With a view to this expansion, our study points to the need to update the qualification of professionals who deal with people who experience this process of transit between cultures in auditory rehabilitation. In the second aspect, we highlight the incidence of conflict/tension in the meanings produced in the narratives. We interpret this incidence as the dialogue of voices, based on observations by Bakhtin (2003; 2010), who linked social and political experiences to human communicative practices.