A Review of Joshua O. Reno, Home Signs: An Ethnography of Life beyond and beside Language. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2024, 264 p.

Abstract

The book by American anthropologist Joshua O. Reno is based on autoethnography and contains an analysis of the means of communication used in communicating with a non-verbal autistic person with reduced intelligence. The author puts forward the thesis that these means represent a type of home signs — a communicative system not associated with natural language. In five chapters, the author analyses the main practical problems faced by parents of a non-verbal autistic child, and also considers the functioning of spontaneously developed routine methods of interaction. The book is written in the perspective of new critical studies of disability, rejecting “ableism” as the dominant attitude of Western culture, which is a view of disability through the eyes of a “normal” individual, not affected by disability. The alternative backed by the author is based on the idea that the physical and mental “norm” is a conditional concept that cannot be relied on when understanding the fulness of a person as a human being.