Case Study: the Vineyard
Our DNA—that double helix that holds the blueprints for growth—can sometimes trap us in more ways than just which disease we might develop later in life. , an anthropologist, studies not just how our genetics can dictate whether we are born deaf, but how that initial mutation in the double helix can then shape how an entire community approaches silence and noise.
From the mid-seventeenth century until the turn of the twentieth, the small, isolated towns of Chilmark and West Tisbury on Martha’s Vineyard were home to a group of genetically linked families that mostly carried a unique recessive genetic mutation that led to an astounding number of deaf children being born every year. The proportion of hearing to deaf was exponentially greater on the island than on the mainland.
These individuals, enclosed in their own silent worlds, were “just like everybody else,” the Island elders told Groce. The deaf were fully integrated into society, freely communicated with any and all (as most hearing people had learned the pidgin sign language used on the Vineyard)—there was no barrier between those who were constantly infiltrated by noise and those who experienced a fundamentally silent world. Their “disability” did not exist in these genetically and geographically isolated towns; instead of thinking that the deaf were tragically enclosed in their own world, they were remarkably unremarkable.
Then the automobile came, and some moved to the mainland and some stayed; the communities were no longer penned in by water, deaf children were not born in such astounding numbers, and the recessive gene for heredity deafness dissipated and disappeared. The double helix did not, in this case, confine because the community chose not to isolate those who could not hear.
