6

Deaf Tourism in Bali

Erin Moriarty

Tourism is a truly global, far-reaching industry (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2011); according to the anthropologist Edward Bruner, it is “one of the greatest population movements of all time” (2005, p. 10). Tourism involves rituals in various forms, including the ritual of preparation and the ritual of entry and exit—which can be symbolic and/or physical, as in the experience of crossing national or regional borders. Travel in the form of tourism involves relationships with people and places, as well as certain practices, such as “the tourist gaze” (Urry & Larsen, 2011)—the desire for, and imaginary of, certain places and people. According to Urry and Larsen (2011):

Tourism is a leisure activity which presupposes its opposite, namely regulated and organised work; tourism relationships arise from a movement of people to, and their stay in, various destinations […] which are outside the normal places of residence and work; [and] […] places are chosen to be gazed upon because there is an anticipation, especially through day-dreaming and fantasy of intense pleasures […] constructed and sustained through a variety of non-tourist practices, such as film, television, literature, magazines, records and videos, which construct and reinforce the gaze; an array of tourist professionals develop who attempt to reproduce ever-new objects for the tourist gaze. (p. 4)

As the authors note, tourism is a leisure activity that involves and operates on multiple scales. As such, there are several interrelated forms of mobility in tourism, including physical movement through space and time and social mobility through consumption and cultural capital. Tourism includes the mobility of people, as well as ideas, semiotic resources, bits and pieces of languages, and so on. Tourism is a significant form of mobility with an oversized role in the circulation of people and ideas (Sheller & Urry, 2006a; Urry, 2000).

During my fieldwork observations, I noted that many deaf tourists tended to refer to themselves as “travelers” and almost never as “tourists.” The term tourist tends to be seen as implying a superficial understanding of, and relationship to, the people and places being visited. Conversely, being a traveler has a special significance for many people, both deaf and hearing, because there is a deeply ingrained belief that travel leads to greater empathy and a global consciousness—in other words, a cosmopolitan outlook (Lew, 2018; Moriarty & Kusters, 2021). Travel has long been believed to be a form of cosmopolitan engagement with “the other” that leads to the expansion of knowledge of other people, places, and ways of life because travel involves learning about other groups of people and places through experiencing them (Falk et al., 2012; Lew, 2018). This worldview has a considerable history. The Grand Tour in the mid-1600s to late-1800s was explicitly devised as a way for young Europeans from the upper classes to acquire gravitas and worldliness by traveling through Europe, visiting artists, learning languages, and acquiring cultural artifacts (Towner, 1985). The ideal of travel as a way of becoming worldly and informed holds true for deaf tourists, especially because travel is linked with cultural capital and the ideals of deaf cosmopolitanism (Moriarty & Kusters, 2021).

As we observed in Chapter 1, deaf people have always traveled; however, it is the “elite” mobilities of white men of certain nationalities with greater access to capital that have historically been better documented and studied than those of nonwhite people, women, queer people, and so forth (Moriarty & Kusters, 2021; Murray, 2007; see also Chapter 10). As leisure travel has become increasingly easy for those with sufficient material resources—including, for example, a powerful passport that allows tourists of certain nationalities to cross borders easily, often without an advance visa (Henley & Partners, 2022)—a wider range of deaf mobilities can now be observed, including the visible proliferation of deaf travel influencers on social media, of whom some are people of color. It should be noted that, as with any other identity group, it is difficult to categorize deaf tourists except by using “deaf”: Deaf tourists are not easily categorized as backpackers, spiritual tourists, dark tourists, cruisers, and so forth. Deaf people engage in all kinds of travel—they travel solo, in groups, in chartered tour groups, with friends, and with strangers. Deaf tourists may stay in upscale hotels, do homestays with deaf “locals” (see Chapter 7), and use social networking accommodation services such as Airbnb, Couchsurfing.com, and so forth. However, the majority of deaf people in the world do not necessarily participate in tourism, whether due to a lack of interest or to limited access to material and/or social capital (see Chapter 10).

In this book, we focus on deaf tourisms that involve encounters between deaf people of different nationalities, disparate socioeconomic backgrounds, and various language backgrounds. Just as deaf tourism itself has expanded, so too has recent scholarship expanded to increasingly focus on differences in the expectations of tourists and local deaf people (Cooper, 2015, 2017; Friedner & Kusters, 2014; Haualand, 2007; Kusters, 2015; Moriarty, 2020a; Moriarty & Kusters, 2021; Moriarty Harrelson, 2015, 2017). Different kinds of deaf tourism operate on different scales: Some are tied to major international deaf events (see Chapter 7), others involve solo deaf backpacking around a region, yet others entail a small group of friends going on holiday together. In many of these cases, deaf tourists will seek out “the deaf stranger” (Breivik, 2005, p. 9) so as to find a sense of belonging (see Chapter 9). These deaf strangers are sought in places such as the Bakery Cafes in Kathmandu, Nepal, which are staffed by deaf Nepalis and have become deaf tourist attractions (Hoffmann-Dilloway, 2016), as well as other “deaf” spaces on what I have referred to elsewhere as the “global deaf circuit” (Moriarty Harrelson, 2015). In this book, we refer to the global deaf circuit as translocal, which I use in this chapter to highlight the connections and interrelationships between different places and people at different scales (see Porst & Sakdapolrak, 2017, and Chapter 1).

I report in this chapter on my research on deaf tourism in Bali, but I first became interested in the field of deaf tourism while conducting fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation in Cambodia. There, I met many tourists, which led me to think more about language ideologies in international encounters and to consider deaf values in relation to sign languages and “appropriate” ways of socializing. I began to consider deaf tourists and expatriates as a vector for ideologies about deaf empowerment, identity, and sign languages. The sheer volume of foreign visitors circulating through Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, was striking; many of these visitors, if they were deaf themselves or affiliated with deaf people, had an interest in other deaf people. They found their way to schools for deaf children in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, as well as to relevant nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), usually through having researched online and through social media. Through my observations, I began to recognize that there was a significant number of deaf tourists following the same travel paths, and that many of these tourists did not realize that their visit was not unique. As a postgenocide country, Cambodia is often imagined to be a challenging place in which to travel, and these tourists frequently assumed that they were among very few people from the Global North to visit. As such, they underestimated their cumulative impact on “local” deaf people. I continued to observe this phenomenon elsewhere in Southeast Asia, conducting fieldwork with deaf tour guides and deaf tourists on the global deaf circuit and finding that small businesses, shops, cafés, deaf schools, and NGOs have become important destinations throughout the world for deaf tourists intentionally seeking out other deaf people and deaf spaces (Moriarty Harrelson, 2015, 2017). These sites are “stops” on the “global deaf circuit,” which should be understood as a form of tourism that involves “seeing how they live,” learning and communicating in new sign languages, and meeting “local” deaf people (Moriarty Harrelson, 2015). The global deaf circuit is an inherently translocal deaf space because “local” deaf people encounter tourists; this is discussed further below.

Deaf tourism has its own moral landscape characterized by deaf social values and expectations. For many deaf people, travel is conceptually linked with emancipation (or the potential for such); through mobility, deaf people become cosmopolitans via the breaking down of boundaries between nations, localities, and languages. There is also a somewhat controversial element involved in deaf tourism, regarding employment. Some deaf people are underemployed and/or, if they are located in the Global North, receive government benefits; many use these benefits to travel the world. Most likely, this is because, in the short term, it takes a similar degree of material resources to travel through the Global South as it does to live at home in the Global North, and there is increased cachet in being known as a deaf world traveler and in earning money through social media platforms and sponsorships. Ironically, being on benefits or receiving government assistance leads to increased mobility for some deaf tourists. This is not without controversy: There are also many deaf tourists who work full time and/or do not receive benefits, who then become angry about perceived “freeloaders” who travel for months on end using their government benefits.

In my research in Cambodia, I focused particularly on the deaf Cambodians who worked as informal guides, and the transition from a moral economy of informal guiding to a more commodified relationship between deaf “locals” and tourists. As tourism became more of an economic activity, deaf “locals” recognized that tourism offered an opportunity for “professional” employment, leading to conflicting expectations between deaf tourists and “locals.” Another element of morality involved in deaf tourism is the ethics of deaf hospitality, which I observed in Cambodia, Laos, and Indonesia; this theme also emerged during interviews. In Indonesia (and in many other places), “local” deaf people will gladly guide foreigners through their city or area without expectation of compensation; however, this is changing because an increasing number of deaf people have started for-profit businesses catering to tourists (see Moriarty Harrelson, 2015). The ethics of deaf hospitality involves inviting solo deaf backpackers or small groups of deaf backpackers into the home, allowing them to sleep there for free; however, this is not necessarily reciprocal.

In a different example of “deaf” moral values in tourism, Cooper (2015) describes a conflict that occurred during her fieldwork in Vietnam, when a deaf-led tour company, owned and staffed by people from the United States, scheduled a tour to Vietnam but did not include local deaf people in the planning or hire them as guides. She also describes a situation where deaf Vietnamese people were disappointed by the service they received when they visited Cambodia with a deaf tour company. They had believed that they would have a deaf guide and became angry when they realized their tour guide was hearing despite his ability to sign.

Tourism scholars have noted that tourists seek out new, yet familiar, experiences that are driven by tourist imaginaries, which are “socially transmitted representational assemblages that interact with people’s personal imaginings and that are used as meaning-making and world-shaping devices” (Salazar, 2012, p. 864). Without stories, images, and desires, there would be no tourism (Salazar, 2010). Salazar and Graburn (2014) note that tourist imaginaries are structured by binary essentialized dichotomies, such as nature–culture, here–there, inside–outside, and global–local. In the case of deaf tourists, their imaginaries are sometimes based on extremes of comparison (see Chapter 1)—the idea of there being deaf “heavens and hells” (Friedner & Kusters, 2014), with the deaf experience in the Global South typically imagined as “hellish” because of lack of education, legal protections, and services. However, deaf tourists also seek out the familiar in the deaf people and deaf spaces where they visit, as well as the different sign languages they are exposed to (Breivik, 2005). Deaf people with diverse backgrounds and nationalities travel in search of other deaf people, motivated by the commonalities they believe that deaf people throughout the world share, as well as by the desire to see some form of difference (Moriarty Harrelson, 2015). Deaf tourists may yearn to experience local deaf lives firsthand, and meeting other deaf people in the context of tourism is a way of doing this. A common refrain among many deaf tourists expresses the desire to “see how they really live”; in doing this, deaf tourists are searching for a deaf home abroad—that is, a sense of belonging (see Chapter 9).

The desire to “see how they live” compels tourists to seek out deaf people for home stays. In Cambodia, I observed and talked to two deaf tourists from France, who told me that they canceled their hotel room, losing their deposit in the process, to stay with a deaf Cambodian woman because they “wanted to see what a Cambodian home looks like and how they really live.” It could be argued that the desire to “see how they really live” indicates the embodied, sensory nature of deaf tourism; deaf tourists desire to bodily experience other deaf lives so that they can truly feel that they are members of a common “deaf world.” There is a personal, affective element to deaf tourism—it often includes making connections with other deaf people, as well as experiencing otherness. To experience otherness in the form of encounters with people and languages, deaf tourists have posted vlogs asking where to find local deaf people in the countries they will visit or asking for the “right” sign for a specific country or place (Moriarty, 2020a). These acts signal a moral stance in regard to being aware of, and showing respect for, local signs and sign languages.

As a part of the deaf experience, many deaf tourists and the people they meet (such as other tourists, deaf guides, and/or the people who live in the places they visit) engage in comparisons (also see Chapter 5 for comparisons in deaf professional mobility). These comparisons include comparing different signs for the same thing or concept, such as comparing signs meaning “toilet” in Indian Sign Language (ISL) and Indonesian Sign Language (BISINDO) (see 00:45:30 in #deaftravel),¹ comparing deaf rights and accessibility in their respective countries, and/or comparing lived experiences (e.g., getting a cochlear implant, learning sign language for the first time) (see 00:41:00 in #deaftravel).² There are also comparisons to be made between different deaf lives and life circumstances—that is, “seeing how they live.” Visiting deaf schools is an important element within this kind of deaf sociality, because it seems that deaf education settings and methodologies (such as oralism) are treated as a kind of litmus test for the level of deaf rights and empowerment the country is perceived to have (see Friedner & Kusters, 2014).

Deaf cosmopolitan aspirations (for tourists) are entwined with the desire to meet deaf people, contribute to local deaf businesses, and “help” deaf local people; this is done by moving through a glocal deaf circuit, in which can be found localized place-nodes such as deaf schools, deaf organizations, and so on (Moriarty Harrelson, 2015; see also Chapter 7). However, these aspirations are different for tour guides, about which I explain more below. As deaf people navigate different networks, they might also be participating in “the deaf ecosystem,” a term for the circulation of capital (e.g., money, knowledge) among deaf people, with the aim of deaf self-reliance. The term “deaf ecosystem” was first coined by a deaf lawyer in the United States, Kelby Brick, as a social media campaign to promote deaf patronage of deaf-owned businesses and service providers. In the deaf ecosystem, deaf people hire deaf guides (or, on the flip side, deaf guides provide services to deaf clients); they go to deaf-owned breweries and restaurants; and they establish mutual support networks where knowledge, goods, food, and money are exchanged between deaf people. In this chapter, I expand on the term to include the circulation of other forms of deaf capital and the moral imperative to support deaf businesses. In addition to its use in popular deaf discourse, #DeafEcosystem is also a popular hashtag on social media, connecting various aspects of deaf mobility, including the circulation of deaf moral imperatives, such as the patronage of deaf businesses (hostels, restaurants, and tour guides) by tourists, and also these businesses being tourist destinations in their own right.

Social media platforms, especially Facebook, are spaces where deaf people interested in travel can share experiences, photos, and videos in groups such as “Solo Deaf Travelers” and “Deaf Travel Group.” Individuals’ social media identities, used to share their travels, often flag their identification as deaf people. Some of these content creators include Marlene Valle, a deaf Mexican American travel content creator in her late 20s, who is known on social media as Deafinitely Wanderlust; the Deaf Wanderer (a deaf white man from the United States, who is no longer creating content); and pages such as “Seek the World,” managed by Calvin Young, a white man in his 30s from the United States whose sponsorship by Sorenson (a U.S.-based video relay interpreting provider) enables him to travel and make films of fellow deaf people and deaf-related things and businesses in different parts of the world. Another American deaf tourist who travels with sponsorships is Joel Barish, a white man in his late 40s or early 50s, who is one of the most well-known deaf influencers on social media. His website states that he has

visited 92+ nations around the world in an effort to live as much of the Deaf experience as possible. Joel has discovered Deaf individuals in every corner and has shared thousands of unique stories with others with sign language videos and social media. (Barish, 2021)

One example of his work is the film of deaf Rohingya refugees living in Kutupanlong Refugee Camp, Bangladesh (see Barish, 2020).³ Deaf travelers from Europe have also established a website, Blank Canvas Voyage. The combination of corporate sponsorships and social media promotion can thus be used as a way of financing travel for some deaf tourists and, through this, showing their audiences “how they live.”

Many deaf tourists who are not sponsored influencers also engage in making short videos of their travels to post on social media, filming sign languages, deaf businesses and craftspeople, and deaf people in different circumstances. Social media plays an important role for deaf tourists in sharing these experiences and also in seeking deaf contacts and places to enrich their travels. Hashtags such as #DeafWorld and #DeafTravel are used by deaf tourists on social media to promote their photos and travel blogs, to find other deaf tourists, to ask for recommendations, to find out the “correct” signs for specific cities or countries (Moriarty, 2020a; see Chapter 8), and to spotlight deaf businesses and deaf spaces.

In this chapter, I focus on the translocal nature of deaf tourism within the global deaf circuit. The concept of translocal readily illustrates the dynamic interrelationship between the global and the local, and it fits with the translocal framework used throughout this book. I then present the findings of my research on deaf tourism in Bali—in particular, two deaf tour guides working there. The “deaf village” of Bengkala receives particular attention as a popular deaf tourist destination tying in with deaf utopian imaginaries. Chapters 7–10 of this book include data on the deaf tourists I encountered in Bali, as well as their ideologies and practices.

The Global Deaf Circuit

Traveling on the global deaf circuit involves many interrelated but potentially contradictory elements. There is the desire to meet other deaf people or to help them by volunteering, as well as a sense of nostalgia and a quest for authenticity that leads to the commodification of deaf people and sign languages. Deaf tourists often begin their search for other deaf people at established places, such as deaf schools, deaf organizations, “deaf cafés,” and similar places where deaf people gather (see Chapter 7). Deaf schools throughout the world are popular destinations for deaf tourists; many deaf tourists to France make the “pilgrimage” to the Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris, the first public school for deaf children, which was established in 1760.

The purposeful quest for spaces where deaf people live and work—whether deaf clubs (Cooper, 2015), cafés staffed by deaf people (Moriarty Harrelson, 2017b), coffee shops operated by deaf associations (Hoffmann-Dilloway, 2016), “deaf villages” (Kusters, 2015), and NGOs working with deaf people (Moriarty Harrelson, 2015)—can be understood in terms of a global deaf circuit that deaf tourists traverse. However, the global deaf circuit is very much a translocal phenomenon. The term translocal refers to the interconnectedness of the global and local, highlighting the fact that local deaf spaces and identities involve (and have always involved) global contacts in some form; indeed, translocal is useful across the board for understanding the process and impact of globalization, because globalization also happens at the local level and its impacts are embedded in localized spaces and experiences. The translocal framework explicitly highlights the global–local dynamic of globalization: It is fundamentally shaped and transformed by the connections between people, things, and spaces, both across and within different scales. “Local” deaf spaces are never quite local because of the density of interconnectivity between deaf people in various locations throughout the world (see Chapter 7), especially since the advent of social media and more affordable technology. However, the glocal deaf circuit is not a recent phenomenon because there have been many deaf tourists throughout history who have sought out other deaf people and deaf spaces.

Earlier deaf travelers on the global deaf circuit documented their experiences in travelogs. Breivik (2005) notes that many of these travelogs refer to “the ease of communication” with deaf “native” signers abroad and to the experience of feeling at home with other deaf strangers, as well as the purposeful seeking out of other deaf people (e.g., Nieminen, 1990; Parsons & Chitwood, 1988). These deaf travelers include Henri Gaillard, a deaf French activist who traveled to the United States in the early 1900s, and Frances Parsons, a prolific deaf traveler from the United States who traveled in Africa, Latin America, and Asia in the 1980s–1990s. Gaillard first traveled from France to the United States for an event to honor the founders of the American School for the Deaf (ASD), and he wrote about deaf spaces and organizations such as the National Fraternal Society of the Deaf, Saint Ann’s Church for the Deaf, the New York Institution (the world’s first military college for the deaf), the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company (a large employer of the deaf), and what was then Gallaudet College, now University (Gaillard, 1917/2002). Frances Parsons spent her childhood in California and Tahiti, and then attended Gallaudet College in the 1940s and 1960s (Parsons, 2005). Because of her privileged access to influential decision-makers, Parsons was able to influence ideas about education and language in the countries she visited and, as such, had an outsized impact on the trajectories of deaf education across the Global South—an example of how ideas and values from the United States circulate on a global level and travel in the form of language ideologies and beliefs about deaf education (see Chapter 7 for parallels with Andrew Foster).

Across the world, there are now many businesses that cater to deaf tourists on the global deaf circuit, and they comprise a part of the deaf ecosystem. These businesses often started out as an informal economy of expatriates, many from the United States, hosting other deaf people in their homes or by “showing them around” in exchange for a meal and/or similar small forms of compensation (Moriarty Harrelson, 2015). The question of compensation has sometimes led to conflict, when tourists have misunderstood this and believed that they were being shown around because of the DEAF-SAME affinity, as in the case of a group of older, white, deaf French tourists who had invited a few deaf Cambodians to join them for a meal at a restaurant in Phnom Penh but did not pay the deaf Cambodians for their time or the meal. The meal was at a restaurant that catered to tourists and expatriates, and it was beyond the means of the deaf Cambodians. After this meal, a deaf Cambodian woman cried because she was so angry; she felt that she had been taken advantage of, and she could not afford the meal. Some of these conflicting expectations have also resulted in friction between deaf tourists and guides, because some deaf tourists may have personal relationships with the guides or be connected to them somehow through national or regional deaf networks (see Chapter 7), and tourists have come to expect that guiding will be provided for free based on that friendship or on personal connections.

Deaf people from the United States have also established tourism businesses in Cambodia, Italy, and Japan. One expatriate from the United States established Cambodia Deaf Tours after a number of people contacted her, wanting to visit Cambodia at a time when deaf tourism was only just emerging. The steady stream of deaf visitors led her to recognize a business opportunity, and she started training a hearing Cambodian former tuk-tuk driver who had learned ASL and Cambodian Sign Language (CSL), as well as deaf Cambodian guides (see Moriarty Harrelson, 2017b). Cambodia Deaf Tours started as a small-scale, informal guiding service for friends of friends; as the number of visitors to Cambodia increased, it became an established business with a website and a list of offerings. The business eventually merged with another major player in the deaf tourism industry, Hands On Tours, an international tourism business based in Italy but owned and operated by deaf people from the United States. The idea for Hands On Tours was seeded in 1999 when a deaf graduate of Gallaudet University, Terry Giansanti, traveled to Italy to work for the Italian Deaflympics committee in Rome. In 2002, Giansanti founded Hands On Italia with the support of Roberto Wirth (now deceased), the deaf owner of the five-star Hotel Hassler, located at the top of the Spanish Steps. The company became Hands On Tours (henceforth HOT) in 2005.

According to its website, HOT was founded in response to negative comments made by deaf tourists about the chaos of Rome and how badly organized the 2001 Deaflympics had been. Since then, the demand for deaf-centric tourism has grown, and HOT has steadily expanded its offerings beyond Italy to include tours of diverse parts of the world. It now offer tours in more than 60 countries worldwide, in the form of small group tours with deaf guides and deaf-centric itineraries. It focuses on providing “exceptional travel experiences” with sign language guides, and what it has termed “uniquely deaf experiences,” such as visits to historic deaf sites in, for example, Paris. More recently, due to the standstill of travel during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020–2022, HOT has started to offer sign language classes in French Sign Language (LSF), Mexican Sign Language (LSM), and Italian Sign Language (LIS). These classes take place online and seem to be a marketing strategy to generate excitement about HOT’s tours.

As noted previously with the example of Frances Parsons, deaf travelers often have a “development agenda” (Baptista, 2012). In this sense, development refers to the practice of international development and also personal development. For about a decade in the 2000s, there was a proliferation of North Atlantic–based organizations (e.g., Discovering Deaf Worlds, Global Reach Out, Global Deaf Connection) with the mission of facilitating “empowerment” exchanges, which are intended to empower deaf people in developing countries through informal social interactions, as well as through the formal programming of team-building activities, leadership enrichment, and workshops (Friedner & Kusters, 2014; Kusters et al., 2015; Moriarty Harrelson, 2015). Many of these “voluntourist” experiences are focused on “uplifting” other deaf people who are perceived as having less access to resources such as formal educational opportunities and on circulating discourses on “deaf empowerment.”

Friedner argues that “morality, or acting as an appropriate deaf person, is a key component of deaf sociality” (2015, p. 159). Deaf sociality includes engaging in what Friedner (2015) calls “sameness work,” which is when deaf people negotiate class, caste, geographic, educational, religious, and gender differences. However, anthropologists studying encounters among deaf people in tourism in the Global South have noted that sameness work is a fraught endeavor, and it is not necessarily seamless (Friedner, 2015; Friedner & Kusters, 2014; Kusters, 2015; Moriarty Harrelson, 2015). Deaf people who are less mobile and, as such, are perceived as having a lack of access to robust educational and professional employment opportunities have been (Murray, 2007) and still are referred to as deaf people “with no language” (Moriarty Harrelson, 2017b) and are perceived as the deaf Other, living in “deaf hells” (Friedner & Kusters, 2014). For this reason, many deaf tourists feel a moral obligation to “do something” for the deaf Other; however, the above-mentioned scholars have shown that the tourists have often taken away more from the encounter than the “local” people they met.

A different kind of tourism involves humanitarian work or volunteer tourism: that is, “the conscious, seamlessly integrated combination of voluntary service to a destination and the best, traditional elements of travel—arts, culture, geography, history, and recreation—in that destination” (Clemmons from Voluntourism.org, quoted, in Wearing & McGehee, 2013, p. 121). Some people travel as a part of a humanitarian mission, as in the case of Off the Grid, an organization based in the United States that provides light sources and water to deaf people living in areas where disasters have occurred (e.g., Puerto Rico, Haiti, Indonesia, Ukraine). In Indonesia, some of the volunteers who worked with Off the Grid then traveled through the archipelago on their own, visiting other islands after their mission was completed. Other examples of mobilities that overlap with tourism include academic travel and exchange programs with a “service learning” component, such as those formerly offered by Frontrunners, Gallaudet University, and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. Study abroad programs such as these were advertised as opportunities for participants to become “global citizens” and as an experience that would enhance the students’ marketability as they earn a certificate, or credits toward their degree, by immersing themselves in a new culture, learning a new language, expanding their cultural awareness, and increasing their confidence. Gallaudet University offered the First Year Study Tour for the first time in 2009 following a decline in enrollment; the idea was that offering a free study tour to Costa Rica for 100 students and faculty in their second semester would help to recruit and retain students.

During these “exchanges,” students were expected to interact with “local” deaf people; these tours are translocal because attending deaf events and spaces is considered an important part of the experience. Gallaudet’s First Year Study Tour had the aim of introducing students to international travel and the concept of global citizenship, claiming that students who experience other languages and cultures become “citizens of the world”—or, in other words, deaf cosmopolitans (Moriarty & Kusters, 2021). To fulfill the service learning component, students collected used teletypewriters (TTYs), BlackBerry pagers, and laptops for distribution to the Costa Rican deaf community. The faculty member involved in organizing this explained to me that they would travel to Costa Rica with TTYs in their suitcases, to distribute to deaf people; however, it is not clear how “local” deaf people benefited from this, nor how they were “exchanges” in the true sense, given that they did not have the same level of mobility as the students involved and that it was not necessarily reciprocal.

Kusters et al. (2015) noted that the encounters outlined previously are not sustainable and that, as the people interviewed in Ghana said of the various tourists they had met over the years, “People just keep coming and going” (p. 258). It is important to note that all of the programs discussed in this chapter are now defunct for various reasons. Gallaudet no longer offers the First Year Study Tour program because the university’s retention rates did not improve as hoped, and the Frontrunners teachers decided not to continue the “exchange” program in Ghana because of the lack of sustainability, a disconnect in expectations, and growing awareness of the unequal power dynamics involved in these “exchanges” (Kusters et al., 2015).

In this section, I have introduced the notion of the global deaf circuit as a translocal phenomenon as a way of understanding deaf tourism, especially the strong affective experiences and expectations that drive specific deaf tourist practices. In particular, this includes seeking out other deaf people to experience both sameness and difference. I expanded the literature on deaf tourism to include motivations and rationales for tourist mobilities, as well as the specific experiences that deaf tourists seek out and how deaf tourism ties into the deaf ecosystem. In the next section, I discuss tourism in Bali, as well as my data from fieldwork undertaken in Indonesia in 2018.

Tourism in Bali

Tourism in Bali, a tropical island in Indonesia known as “the island of gods,” dates from the Netherlands’ colonization of the island in the early 20th century (Vickers, 1989). In the 1920s, the Dutch company KPM (Koninklijke Paketvaart-Maatschappij) promoted the island and attracted European visitors. During this initial stage of tourism development in Bali, a number of highly circulated magazines, such as National Geographic, published stories and images representing Bali as a magical place, the last tropical paradise, the island of temples and dances, and so forth (Vickers, 1989). The tourist imaginary of Bali that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s has become an enduring representation of the island, evolving to include more contemporary spiritual elements such as yoga and self-actualization, which were depicted in films such as the 2010 movie Eat Pray Love (Murphy, 2010; see also Picard, 1996; Vickers, 1989). The legacy of Bali’s representation can be observed in contemporary tourists to Bali; on my flight to Bali from Doha, Qatar, in 2018, I noted in my field notes the number of white middle-class women with yoga mats, as well as young white women and couples in expensive-looking yoga or gym clothing, and many people with Russian passports. I had previously observed on Instagram that many of the posts from Bali were in Russian, typically featuring thin, white women in bikinis, posing in front of beautiful natural scenes or by hotel pools; this indicates that Bali is seen as a place to engage in conspicuous consumption on social media.

Since the construction of the Ngurah Rai International Airport in 1969, the number of foreign tourists visiting Bali has dramatically increased, and, as such, mass tourism has become a central part of Balinese socioeconomic life. The centrality of tourism to the economy has led to less agricultural production and the expansion of sectors providing products and services to tourists (Fagertun, 2017). Tourism development has had unintended consequences in Bali, including a transformation in social relations and “traditional” livelihoods, such as the loss of irrigated rice fields to tourism development and conflict over access to resources such as water (Fagertun, 2017; Pickel-Chevalier & Budarma, 2016). Additionally, Balinese temples are still active sites for religious ceremonies and worship, and tourists are often actually intruding on religious ceremonies when they visit. However, many Balinese say nothing about this because of the economy’s reliance on tourism, and temples increasingly are divided into public areas and private areas that are off-limits for tourists.

Bali’s local economy has steadily grown as the number of visitors to the island has increased. Deaf tourists visit Bali from all over the world. There is not an accurate way to track their originating countries; although the Indonesian government does track tourist demographics in general, it does not drill down into subcategories of tourists with regard to disability and so forth. The literature on tourism development has shown the ways in which it can generate revenue but also have negative impacts on social cohesion and relationships within a local community in terms of new class relations and dependence on tourism-based income (Baker & Coulter, 2007; Fagertun, 2017). Some analyses of the impact of tourism in Bali claim that it leads to the total destruction of “culture” and “traditional” ways of life, with the commodification of social practices and sacred rituals, such as dancing and making temple offerings; however, this is a somewhat simplistic way of understanding the complexities of tourism (Howe, 2006).

Deaf tourists to Bali stay in different places depending on their interests and budget. The most popular locations for tourists to stay are Ubud, known for its yoga scene, and Kuta, the party area. However, the deaf tourists who participated in this project have tended to circulate through various parts of Bali, moving from town to town, depending on the kind of activity they want to do. I made the following field notes in Ubud:

I asked [my guide] where deaf tourists tend to stay, and he said that they tend to stay in Kuta, which would be a difficult place for me to situate myself for fieldwork [and find participants]. […] There was a continuous traffic jam from the moment we entered the vicinity that lasted until we passed Kuta. The area is very commercial, built up like a strip mall type area in the United States. […] It is interesting how people paint Bali as a paradise but, in reality, Kuta is really unattractive with many cheap hotels, [and] angry white people on motorbikes, zooming in and out of traffic jams. It seems to be an incredibly stressful place, not Zen or relaxing at all.

Kuta seems to attract a certain kind of tourist, mostly white men who want to have a good time, drinking and partying, although some of the deaf tourists I met stayed there because it is cheap. Others stayed elsewhere, because Bali is a large island with diverse “scenes,” depending on the person’s age, physical fitness, discretionary income, values, and preferred activities. Bali also specifically attracts tourists who identify as gay, lesbian, and/or queer, because they believe that it is safer to be openly gay in Bali as opposed to many of the other islands in the Indonesian archipelago.

Languages are an important part of the touristic experience (see Heller et al., 2014; Pietikainen & Kelly-Holmes, 2011). The deaf guides I met in Bali were skilled communicators, drawing on wide repertoires; as they interacted with deaf tourists, both parties engaged in learning and using new signs, as well as the strategic use of foreign sign languages such as Australian Sign Language (Auslan), International Sign (IS), and ASL, and local sign languages such as BISINDO and Kata Kolok, plus spoken languages—specifically, Indonesian and English (Moriarty, 2020a; see Chapter 8). During fieldwork with deaf tourists, I observed many examples of flexible multimodal and multilingual languaging practices and the creation of translanguaging spaces—that is, “a space for the act of translanguaging as well as a space created through translanguaging” (Li, 2011, p. 1223). This led to the realization that languages and languaging practices are central to deaf cosmopolitanism.

Deaf Tour Guides in Bali

My fieldwork largely focused on two tour guides in Bali, each with different backgrounds, approaches, and target audiences. The first, Wahyu Cayhadi, is a deaf Indonesian man, originally from another island, operating as a private tour guide in Bali, the “Bali Deaf Guide”; he has become a tourist destination in his own right on the glocal deaf circuit, because many deaf tourists who visit Bali have him on their checklist as a “must-see.” In this way, Wahyu is both a node on the glocal deaf circuit (see Chapter 7) and also part of the deaf ecosystem, in the sense that he is a deaf entrepreneur. Wahyu, by his own estimate, has given tours of Bali to more than 1,200 deaf tourists over about 10 years. Interestingly, Wahyu often calls himself a “driver” and refers to his work as “driving” as opposed to guiding. Bali itself does not have a robust public transportation system; tourists are ferried around the island by an intricate network of private drivers who have divided the island into territories based on banjar, or local community, boundaries. Drivers adhere to strict banjar boundaries, and respecting these traditions means that drivers can travel across the island to drop off tourists outside of their territorial line, but they are not typically allowed to pick up tourists outside of their own zone. I have had situations where hearing drivers that I worked with in Ubud have refused to pick me up in other towns because it was dangerous for them; hearing drivers who violate banjar boundaries are subject to beatings and harassment. However, Wahyu seems to be an exception to this rule because he is a deaf driver working with deaf customers; this may be an example of “deaf gain,” in the sense that “whereas popular constructions of deafness are defined exclusively by the negative effects,” there are also “a number of social […] benefits” to being deaf (Bauman & Murray, 2014, p. xxiv).

Most of the time, Wahyu works with individual tourists or with a group of friends who book him for a day tour or sometimes for a few days at a time. Wahyu takes deaf tourists to deaf schools and to the deaf village, Bangkala, working with a set list of destinations that people can negotiate with him to visit; sites on the global deaf circuit can be blended with popular “hearing” tourism sites. He tends to divide tourist sites into clusters based on geography, proximity, and time, to avoid driving randomly all over the island, especially because the roads of Bali are so congested with tourists driving motorcycles with surfboards attached to the side and Balinese men driving SUVs (driving tourists in Bali seems to be an exclusively male occupation). It is typical for people to spend hours traveling short distances. Wahyu has given thought to optimizing both his business and the tourists’ experience by reducing time spent in the car and seeing more sites located in the same area (e.g., the Monkey Forest and the rice terraces of Tellangang, both in Ubud, and a coffee plantation nearby). It is more effective for Wahyu to drive to different tourist attractions in the same area within a half-day or full-day block. Due to the time and distance involved, Wahyu does not offer bespoke tours that do not include the items on his laminated “menu,” which lists 15 different tours covering various sites (he also uses a generic “menu” with photographs of Bali’s main tourist sites). Wahyu also accepts bookings for multiday tours, such as a tour of the Ubud area with another day spent in the south.

Wahyu does not make hotel reservations for his guests or any other kind of arrangement for lodgings; instead, he focuses exclusively on day or multiday tours. He explained to me that he does not make accommodation arrangements because when he previously did so, he had a bad experience. The people that Wahyu had made the arrangements for were not satisfied with his choice of accommodation and complained that it was “not nice enough.” From that point forward, Wahyu decided to not make hotel arrangements.

Before becoming the Bali Deaf Guide, Wahyu worked as a cleaner in a hotel in Kuta. During one of our first conversations in the car at the beginning of my fieldwork, Wahyu explained:

I was working cleaning at […] a hotel, but […] the hotel owners warned the employees that layoffs were coming because business was so bad after the Kuta bombing [in 2002]. […] One day a list of names was posted on the wall; 200 people lost their jobs, including me. I saw my name on the list and went to the owner, said, I am deaf, would you change your mind? Please keep me, I am deaf. But he said no. […] I was unemployed for a year. I searched for a job at other hotels, but they would not hire me because I am deaf. I went to see my old teacher, who told me that I should volunteer at the deaf school as an IT teacher. I volunteered at the school for a while, then went back to school for a diploma in IT. After I graduated, I started looking for jobs again. I couldn’t get a job because I am deaf. With my free time, I started showing foreigners around Bali.

Wahyu told me that, one day, he met a deaf Australian woman who was crying because a hearing driver had just dropped her off at the school for the deaf without any explanation or information (see #deaftravel 00:20:10,⁴ where Wahyu repeated this story in an interview). She told Wahyu that the “hearing driver” stole from her, asserting, “Hearing people are bad!” Wahyu continued, the “deaf [Australian] told me, ‘you would be a good guide,’ so I thought about it and asked other hearing Indonesians for advice on how to start as a tour guide. They told me I needed a website, Instagram, and Facebook.” Wahyu used his IT skills to build his website (https://www.balideafguide.com/) but then realized the website was not working because he needed a server to host it, so he borrowed some money from a deaf friend to pay for a server. For a while, there was no profit. Wahyu had been renting a car, and he made no money because all his earnings went toward paying for the rental. Then, someone told him that he needed to add a little overhead on top of what he was charging people so as to make some money for himself. He started working for the hearing man who owned the car that he was renting. Wahyu said, “I felt wrong. It all felt wrong.”

Wahyu explained that one time, he was giving a tour to a deaf person who wanted to pay him directly. Wahyu explained that all of the money went to the man with the car business, who paid him a small salary. The deaf person was shocked and said, “No, this money is yours!” Wahyu had been working for the hearing man for many years and earning very little, while the man was profiting handsomely from deaf tourists. Wahyu went to his family and asked for a loan to buy his own car so that he could break away from his hearing boss; his father-in-law sold land to help him. At the time we had this conversation, he had owned this car for 7 months.

Throughout Wahyu’s narrative, he continually identified the various protagonists as either “deaf” or “hearing.” As I typed up my field notes, I had the insight that many of the hearing people in Wahyu’s narratives were framed as obstacles to his independence. I wrote, “Wahyu seems really proud to be able to support his family (wife and baby) with his own money. He is successful because of this. He didn’t come out and say so, but I can see he is proud of what he has accomplished as a deaf person.”

Wahyu’s old employer continued to contact Wahyu, asking him to come back and work for him and harassing him for his list of deaf clients, to the extent that Wahyu had moved away from where he used to live. Most of his clients are from Australia, and some are from Europe; he told me that he didn’t have as many clients from the United States and made sweeping comparisons of the destination preferences of different nationalities: “America is too far. Australia is closer. Americans love Hawaii. Europeans love Thailand. Australians love Bali” (see Chapter 5 for more on deaf comparisons and national stereotyping). Wahyu told me that he keeps a record of his clients by photographing himself with them and then posting it on Facebook, partly to remind himself of who he has met over the years, and partly as a form of marketing (see #deaftravel 00:15:13).⁵ When I had first landed in Bali, Wahyu met me and immediately asked to take my photo, and then again when he dropped me off at my lodging in Ubud. This is an interesting example of how it is not only the tourists who take photos but also the guides and other local deaf people (see Chapter 10).

I asked Wahyu if there were any other deaf guides in Bali. He said that there were three Indonesian deaf guides, but that two had been giving tours without a license and were now “blacklisted.” Wahyu used the signs BLACK NAME as if their names were “black” with the police, the implication being that they can never work again as tour guides. Tour guiding is a licensed profession across Indonesia, and provinces have the legislative power to pass regional regulations; tourist guides in Bali are regulated according to the Bali Province Regional Regulation Number 5 (2016), or “Bali Regulation No. 5” (Pratiwi, 2019), which defines a tourist guide as “an Indonesian national having a duty to provide assistance, guidance and advice regarding tourism and all matters needed by tourists.” Tourist guides are required to obtain a Kartu Tanda Pengenal Pramuwisata, or Tour Guide Identity Card (KTPP); foreigners are not eligible to apply for a KTPP under this regulation. In addition, Bali Regulation No. 5 requires a tourist guide to wear Balinese traditional clothing, unless they are assisting tourists who are doing trekking, camping, or water sport activities. Wahyu will sometimes wear traditional clothing when guiding tourists through a temple, but most days he wears shorts and a polo with “Bali Deaf Guide” on the front (see Figure 6.1), probably for the reason that his tours are diverse and often include a range of activities, such as a coffee tasting in the morning and a hike to a waterfall in the afternoon.

Cosmopolitan encounters happen between tourists and between tourists and their guides; sometimes these guides are themselves not only guiding people through Bali but also brokering these international encounters (see the example in Chapter 8 where Wahyu acts as a language broker, using signs from Auslan, LIS [Italian Sign Language], and IS to make clarifications in an interaction between Heena and an Italian woman). Moral considerations in deaf tourism often involve giving in some form (Kusters, 2015; Moriarty Harrelson, 2015), and this “giving” extends to the exchange of signs from different languages.

I have already highlighted that deaf tourists have cosmopolitan aspirations that are entwined with the desire to meet deaf people and to contribute to the local deaf ecosystem while moving through the glocal deaf circuit. However, “local” deaf tourist guides must also be recognized as cosmopolitans in their own right, especially those like Wahyu who have an extensive repertoire of many different sign languages and access to knowledge of the way that other people live. Wahyu will often engage in the sharing of knowledge, not only about Bali but also about the wide roads in Australia, the “ways” of people from certain nationalities, and so on. One day, Wahyu shared with me his observation that “Australians don’t smile. They don’t look happy. They have a good life in Australia, but don’t smile and are not happy.” He appeared to feel a responsibility to share his own philosophy of life, noting that privileged people are not happy because they don’t appreciate what they have.

Figure 6.1. Wahyu wearing his polo shirt.

Wahyu also made distinctions about certain spaces and things being “Indonesian” as opposed to “tourist.” Most tourist sites (both deaf and hearing) are attractions for in-country and foreign tourists, and the sites have different prices for the different groups; this extends into ordinary purchases too. When I first arrived in Indonesia, Wahyu drove me around as I ran several errands (e.g., purchasing a new SIM card for my iPhone, searching for a place to live), and it became clear that he was very conscious of the differences between “local” and “tourist,” especially when it concerned the cost of things. He delineated certain brands of consumer products as being more appropriate for Indonesia than others: Apple phones were too expensive, whereas Samsung and Oppa (made in China) were popular; the cell service 3 had less good signal, whereas Telek was better for signing on video calls. When I was looking for somewhere to stay, Wahyu told me that Denpasar was a good area to find an affordable place with AC, but he cautioned me that “it is all Indonesian.” I said I was fine with this, and he continued to drive me there. The following excerpt is from my field notes:

We continued our drive through Denpasar. Wahyu pointed out the area we were driving through and said, “This is not a good tourist area, this is an Indonesian area. Indonesian people come here and walk around, sightseeing and shopping in the evenings.” He then said, “See, no white people, only you” (with a smile).

Through the months that I followed Wahyu around on his tours, I noticed that he continually made a distinction between what was “foreign” and what was Indonesian. When it was just the two of us, without any tourists, Wahyu would take me to small Indonesian restaurants (warung); the first time we ate at a warung in Kuta, Wahyu said to me with a concerned expression, “Can you eat Indonesian food? [i.e., Do you like it?] It is cheaper.”

Wahyu has a clear cosmopolitan disposition and rich cultural and linguistic capital that he draws on to better understand and entertain the people he guides. He shapes his narratives and observations to the people with whom he interacts—in other words, he calibrates. He also has a strong desire to “help” people—including me, by explaining which SIM cards work best in Indonesia and where I should stay or eat in accordance with my budget and fieldwork requirements.

Giovanni Mansilla is the other deaf tour guide who operates in Bali and other Indonesian islands. He is originally from France, but Gio has made a home in Indonesia, and his love for the country is also permanently etched on his body in the form of a tattoo of the Indonesian archipelago. He is based in Labuan Bajo, a fishing town located at the western end of the large island of Flores in the Nusa Tenggara region of east Indonesia. From this village, Adelia Kiranmala operates her business, Travass Life, a bespoke travel agency with two boats that they sail through the islands of Flores and Komodo. The Travass Life website describes it as specializing in trips “to authentic tropical islands in Indonesia,” where travelers will be exposed to “local experiences, cultures, exotic islands, wildlife, and new inspiring people” (Travass Life, 2022). One of Travass Life’s offerings is a bespoke tour called “Deaf Trip by Travass Life: The Sound of Smile.” These “well-curated deaf trips by sign language” claim to provide “unforgettable journeys for our deaf friends”; the website states, “we believe everyone can travel, there’s no limit. We want to hear you smile” (Travass Life, 2022). The first Sound of Smile tour, which I joined in 2018, was a special tour with Calvin Young of Seek the World (described previously) as one of the guests, tasked with taking photographs and making videos with his drone as part of Travass Life’s marketing strategy.

Gio leads the Sound of Smile tours, but he also works with Adelia on her tours for hearing people. Gio explained to me that he prefers to work with deaf groups because it is more accessible in terms of communication and because he feels more at home with deaf clients; however, the connections made with deaf tourists have not always been smooth. Gio explained that he has had awkward encounters with tourists from Russia and his native France who expected him to guide them around Bali as a favor; he turned them down, saying that he was “trying to run a business” (see #deaftravel 01:39:00).⁶ Like Wahyu (who uses multiple sign languages, as well as IS, English, and Indonesian), Gio is multilingual: He can speak Indonesian and will speak it with hearing Indonesians, and he also signs in BISINDO, ASL, and LSF. Gio has also learned English because of its role as a lingua franca in tourism. Gio said in an interview that he had not placed much value on English, being French himself, but that when he started traveling so much, he realized how important English was for tourism; he thus learned English as a part of his tourism experience. Gio’s translingual skills were especially evident during the 10-day Sound of Smile tour that he led with a multinational, multilingual deaf tour group.

I participated in the Sound of Smile tour in July–August 2018, with a group consisting of mostly white people in their 20s and 30s from Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States (see #deaftravel for footage and analysis of this tour). The 10-day group tour included 3 days on a boat, a flight to another island, and movement through Bali in a minibus, as well as moving between hotels every 2 days. The tour comprised 12- to 14-hour days and required quite a bit of physical fitness and ability. This tour group was thus a different demographic from the tourist clients who usually engaged Wahyu’s services. Wahyu has a wide variety of clients of different ages and physical abilities, with many being older, less fit, and more car dependent; as a consequence, his network is composed primarily of older white people from Australia and elsewhere, with his linguistic influences and translanguaging practices being shaped accordingly. Wahyu’s wide variety of clients can be attributed to his reputation as a “must-see” among deaf tourists of different backgrounds; conversely, the focus of Gio’s tour is more niche, prioritizing sailing around the islands of Flores and Komodo (see Figure 6.2) over visiting more well-trodden destinations. Gio’s demographic is, like Wahyu’s, mostly white, but it is more youthful, social media-focused, physically fit, and aesthetically oriented. Professional photography and video services are an important part of Gio’s tour package; Travass Life offers to “capture all your travel memories that you’ll cherish forever” (Travass Life, 2022), and during the Sound of Smile tour, he and two others (including Calvin) were dedicated to taking photographs and making videos for the tour group. Indeed, the Travass tour had to skip some sites because some group members were so focused on getting the right photo for their Instagram that it took hours to visit a particular site; this upset other group members.

Some tourists on the Travass trip did appear to find the pace set by Gio challenging. Many activities required a level of physical stamina, such as hiking up Mount Agung, jumping off boats, and scuba diving. One of the participants had a challenging time on the mountain during the group hike because of issues with her balance. Kate successfully made it to the top of the mountain with the group but had to be taken back down by motorcycle because she had fallen a few times. Later, another participant in the group commented that he felt bad for Kate because some of the other group members had walked on, leaving Kate behind with Gio and Jente, one of the MobileDeaf cameramen. Due to the physical and social demands placed on them, people with disabilities can be excluded from tour groups on multiple levels; for some neurodivergent people, being around people all the time in enclosed spaces (e.g., sharing bunkrooms, riding in a minivan) and constantly processing new impressions can be overwhelming, especially because the tour schedule may change on short notice. The ability to be flexible with food was also important in the context of Travass tours: the food served on the boats was Indonesian, and the group ate at Indonesian restaurants most of the time, in part because Gio believed in providing an “authentic” experience but also because Indonesian food was more readily available and cheaper (meals were included in the tour price). Wahyu was able to be more flexible regarding individual needs and preferences, accommodating people with mobility disabilities and food preferences, because he works with individuals, couples, and small groups of close friends.

Figure 6.2. Map showing tourist sites in Bali.

Gio and Wahyu appear to have different approaches to tourism. Gio is openly social media influencer oriented, focused on finding “Instagram-worthy” locations; he has stated that he enjoys sharing beautiful places with deaf tourists. Gio goes off the beaten track and invests time in visiting potential locations on reconnaissance trips. His positionality overlaps with his clients in many ways: He is savvy regarding photography and editing, he values social media as a marketing tool and works with social media influencers, is of a similar age, has similar language use, and so on. Yet, interestingly, Gio emphasized that he is a “local” because he lives in Indonesia and speaks and writes Indonesian (see #deaftravel 00:36:08).⁷ Gio’s emphasis on being a local is likely to be down to the influence of certain deaf politics and expectations regarding economic opportunities for other deaf people—for example, the emphasis on supporting the local deaf ecosystem by working with local deaf guides.

In general, there appear to be certain expectations in deaf tourism, especially related to notions of authenticity and to supporting “local” deaf people. When I first arrived in Bali, a deaf person from the United States with whom I was acquainted sent me a message on Twitter asking if I would intervene with Gio about working in Indonesia, and this was only the first in a series of people contacting me to personally intervene with Gio about his “taking work away from locals.” In a different example, deaf tourists visiting Vietnam and Cambodia through a foreign tour agency were assigned guides who used ASL, leading to anger on the part of deaf Vietnamese people, who described the situation in terms of “colonialism” (Cooper, 2015). Similarly, an Australian tourist told me about an acquaintance (also a deaf Australian) who complained that he was “just” a driver for the foreign tour group touring Australia and the tour guides leading the tour were “outsiders” from the United States. A deaf man originally from Ecuador, now living in the United States, told me that he was angry with a foreign tour company for leading tours in Ecuador without his involvement, even though he is no longer living there. As a result of widespread criticism of tour groups not engaging with the local deaf ecosystem, HOT started working more with local deaf guides; this is emphasized in their marketing materials, with the repeated use of the word “local” when describing their offerings, and this aligns with Cooper’s observation that a strong value is placed by many deaf people on deaf connections as being “authentic,” both culturally and linguistically (p. 106).

For reasons related to the above, Gio has been challenged by some deaf tourists who have visited Indonesia for not explicitly including deaf Indonesians in his business; he has, however, established an ongoing relationship with a local deaf organization, Bali Deaf Community, with which he has organized tourist-focused events (see Chapter 7 for an example). Yet, some deaf tourists who adhere to the morality of the deaf ecosystem to the extent of only supporting local deaf businesses will only work with Wahyu, and some have contacted Gio and confronted him about his work in Indonesia, which Gio found hurtful and bewildering (see #deaftravel 01:35:45).⁸ Gio explained that his business has a different focus and demographic than Wahyu, and for this reason, there is no real competition. Based on my fieldwork data, Wahyu sees a greater volume of clients than Gio, especially because he is so well-known and has been in business for much longer. Wahyu also offers a form of authenticity by being Indonesian himself (therefore, a bona fide “local” deaf guide), so his popularity seems to be about his reputation, visibility, and authenticity, as well as deaf morality (e.g., the insistence on support for “locals”).

In contrast to Gio’s emphasis on visually beautiful scenery and “Instagram-worthy” sites, Wahyu’s approach is to take on the role of “translating” Balinese culture for tourists and showing them “how they live.” As a guide, Wahyu “translates” Balinese culture and traditions while making connections to what visitors already know or what is familiar to them (Salazar, 2015). Wahyu finds common ground with tourists, and he uses this as a point of departure from which to calibrate (see Chapter 8), as well as working hard to interpret for and guide people in international encounters. Indeed, some scholars do not consider tourists to be cosmopolitans because of their limited role in interpreting differences, in contrast to the tour guides who translate between cultures but who may never have left their home country (Salazar, 2015). Indeed, the same can be said of many Balinese deaf people who engage in international deaf encounters even when they do not travel much (or at all) outside of Bali, simply by interacting with tourists. Although deaf tourists and deaf hosts and guides connect with each other, there are marked inequalities in financial capital and the ability to travel internationally (see Chapter 10). For example, although Wahyu is hypermobile within Bali, he does not have the same international mobility as a deaf person with a European or United States passport; furthermore, however cosmopolitan he and other deaf Balinese people are, tourists continue to perceive tour guides as “local” and themselves as cosmopolitan (Salazar, 2015, p. 62).

Wahyu has only traveled abroad once: to Australia, at the behest of the various Australian tourists he met in Bali, who worked together to raise funds for him to visit them and to sponsor his visa (see Chapter 7). Wahyu was proud of the number of sponsors he gained for this trip; he told me, “I went to the visa office and they asked me, who is your sponsor? I said, I have over 1,200! They were shocked.” This trip was Wahyu’s first time abroad: first time inside an airport, past security, and on an airplane. He explained, a little shyly, that he had asked someone at the airport for help because he didn’t know where to go and needed guidance. This was a reversal of roles because Wahyu is usually the one who is guiding the tourist through the unfamiliar, having waited outside of the airport hundreds of times. This demonstrates that cosmopolitanism is not necessarily dependent on international mobility. In the next section, I discuss a popular tourist destination on the glocal deaf circuit in Bali.

Bengkala in the Tourist Imaginary

Bengkala, known as “Desa Kolok” (“deaf village” in Balinese), is a village in north Bali with a high degree of hereditary deafness. It is increasingly popular with tourists, both hearing and deaf, domestic and foreign, because of Kata Kolok, a shared sign language that is believed to be used by more than half of the 3,031 hearing villagers to communicate with the 44 deaf villagers who live there. The residents of Bengkala are carriers of a recessive gene, and due to its concentration in the area through endogamous marriages, there have been several successive generations of deaf people, resulting in Bengkala becoming a “shared signing community” (Kisch, 2008). Other examples of shared signing communities include the Al-Sayyid Bedouin, Ban Khor in Thailand, and Adamorobe in Ghana (Kusters, 2014; Zeshan & de Vos, 2012). Tourists arrive in Bengkala in different ways: Some deaf tourists arrive with a hearing driver, but many take a day tour with Wahyu, who drives them there and introduces them to a deaf family with whom he is acquainted, sharing his knowledge about Bengkala as a way of supporting the deaf villagers.

International tourism to Bengkala has been strongly influenced by its position as a site of research, attracting (predominantly hearing and mostly nonsigning) researchers from universities in Australia, the United States, and the Netherlands, as well as domestic researchers from Indonesia. Over the past 30 years, researchers in genetics (Friedman et al., 2000; Wang et al., 1998; Winata et al., 1995), linguistics (de Vos, 2012, 2016; Marsaja, 2008; Perniss & Zeshan, 2008; Schwager & Zeshan, 2008), and sociolinguistics (Branson et al., 1999; Hinnant, 2000; Marsaja, 2008) have all worked in Bengkala at different times, continuing to the present day. During my own fieldwork period in 2018, there was a team of two hearing, nonsigning researchers, one from the University of Kansas and the other from an Indonesian university, eliciting data from the deaf villagers on the Balinese geocentric directional system.

Early sociolinguistics researchers in Bengkala chose not to name the village in their publications, referring instead to “Desa Kolok,” the local designation (Branson et al., 1996, 1999; Marsaja, 2008). This seems to have been an effort to conceal the location and identity of the village. Other sign language linguists have adopted a similar approach when dealing with “deaf villages”: Kisch (2008) did not refer to her research locations by name in her early publications, and Johnson (1991) referred to his as “a Yucatec Maya village,” later identified as Chican by other researchers working there (e.g., Escobedo Delgado, 2012). These attempts to protect the anonymity of the people living there, and to prevent these sites from becoming the target of tourist and media interest, ultimately failed. Bengkala has had a steady stream of touristic visitors for several years now, many of whom are deaf foreigners; as of 2019, the volume of visitors has since intensified.

In an interview with one of the hearing villagers, I asked how Bengkala came to be a popular tourist destination. He explained that a researcher in the village made a video to raise money for the village primary school as a way of supporting the community. After this video was made and uploaded to the internet, increasing numbers of people started visiting Bengkala. De Vos (2012) dates the increase in international visitors in Bengkala to 2009, when two volunteers from the Netherlands began working at the village elementary school, the construction of which was funded by Vrienden van Effatha, a Dutch foundation; this connection led to an uptick of Dutch tourists. She also attributes the increase in media attention to a publication supported by the World Bank (de Vos, 2012). However, there seems to have been various “moments” when Bengkala became famous, such as during the second Cross-Linguistic Sign Language Research (CLSLR, now SIGN) conference in Nijmegen in 2007, which included two presentations by researchers on the village. One person whom I interviewed explained that he learned about Bengkala from a paper presented at an academic conference.

The continuing media interest in Bengkala was evidenced by the number of television and film crews that I observed during my stay in the village; they came from Singapore, Japan, and France. Intensified media attention has also brought corporate endorsements from Pertamina (an Indonesian state-owned oil and natural gas company based in Jakarta) and Wells Fargo (an American multinational financial services company headquartered in San Francisco, California); in 2018, the latter sponsored the making of a 3-minute film with Great Big Story, “an award-winning global media company owned by CNN Worldwide dedicated to inspiring wonder and curiosity,” showcasing the “uniqueness” of Bengkala and Kata Kolok.⁹ In response to the increased publicity and visitors, the Deaf Alliance, a local group of deaf and hearing community members advocating for the rights of deaf villagers and their hearing relatives, has begun a process in which they evaluate and approve requests for media coverage and research projects (de Vos, 2012). My research was endorsed in this way by the leader of the Deaf Alliance at the time.

Tourists from the United States and Europe who have visited Bengkala have described it on social media and in interviews as “isolated” and “remote”; however, this is somewhat inaccurate. Bengkala is far from the areas where most of Bali’s tourism is concentrated, but it is easily accessible by car, being located just off of one of the main north-south routes running through Bali, and a 3-hour (approximately 44 miles) drive from Ngurah Rai airport. Furthermore, Bengkala is connected to neighboring villages and towns through kinship links (Branson et al., 1999), and there are several villages in the region whose residents have similar signing practices as in Bengkala (Branson et al., 1999). Despite this, some researchers have used the representation of Bengkala as geographically and socially isolated to explain the emergence of a local sign language (Marsaja, 2008). This overlooks the likelihood that Bengkala is considerably more touristed and publicized than other “deaf villages” with similar characteristics in other countries because it is located in Bali, a popular tourist destination, and easily reachable from the south of Bali, where most tourists circulate.

The village has developed public spaces specifically to accommodate the increased tourism, such as a small open-air “cultural center,” where tourist-facing activities such as dance performances take place. This was built using donations from Pertamina and support from the local government, and the blue, green, and red Pertamina corporate logo decorates the sign at the entrance to this area; inside, there is a glass display case with stacks of woven cloth for sale to tourists, as well as a visitors’ logbook (see Figure 6.3). In a building behind the pavilion, four weaving looms stand, emblazoned with stickers with the Pertamina logo. The weaving hut is part of a development project to provide livelihoods for deaf women in Bengkala; however, at the time of writing, only one woman works there. The pavilion has a television set; sometimes, when they know to expect visitors, deaf men go there to watch television as they wait to perform Janger Kolok, or “deaf dance,” for tourists. This dance, accompanied by hearing men beating on drums, is similar to a Balinese performance called janger, which emerged in the 1930s and involves loud gamelan (a traditional orchestra). Janger kolok incorporates elements of Balinese traditional dance with innovations developed by the Bengkala community, such as an imitation of the gamelan via vocalizing from one of the deaf men (de Vos, 2012; Marsaja, 2008).

Figure 6.3. Erin and two people from Bengkala in the “cultural center.”

The touristic experience of Bengkala involves interactions in sign language with deaf villagers at their homes. These encounters, and quickly learning a few signs in Kata Kolok, have become exchangeable objects as part of a broader trend toward the commodification of sign languages and deaf experiences. During fieldwork, it became clear that Bengkala is a popular destination for deaf tourists because, in the deaf tourist imagination, it is a “deaf utopia”: a place where “everyone can sign” and where deaf people are fully accepted. “Deaf utopias” hold special significance for many deaf people because they are imagined to be sites where large numbers of deaf people congregate and where the use of sign language is prevalent and unmarked; small-scale shared signing communities are thought of as deaf utopias because the ability to interact with everyone in everyday contexts, such as on the street, in the store, and/or in the fields, can be taken for granted (Kusters, 2010). Deaf utopias are believed to be fully accessible in terms of life opportunities, experiences, and language ecology.

Deaf tourists to Bengkala are frequently fascinated by examples of unique deaf-related cultural forms and practices, such as the presence of a deaf god in the village cosmology (see Marsaja, 2008), which some interpret as an indicator of the positive social construction of deaf people. This itself then becomes a draw for deaf visitors. Other forms of exceptionalism attributed to deaf people in Bengkala include the assignment of special roles to deaf men because of their reputed strength and fearlessness; these include fitting and repairing water pipes and acting as security during village festivals. Some villagers claim that deaf people are invulnerable to the evil spirits that haunt the graveyard because they cannot hear them. Many of the hearing villagers say that deaf people are strong and are therefore better suited to manual labor and security. Deaf people are also responsible for the catching and butchering of animals for feasts and celebrations and carrying the wadah, a tall pyramidal wooden structure full of ornamental decorations in which a dead person’s body is placed for cremation, to the cemetery (Marsaja, 2008). The most unique role of all is grave digging, exclusively assigned to deaf men. This is not common in other villages in the area because this is usually the task of close family members of the deceased (Marsaja, 2008). These details have filtered through the media and are known to some deaf tourists, who tend to see this exceptionalism as positive and affirming of the special role deaf people have in the village. However, this interpretation may obscure or downplay the caste-based stigma often associated with these jobs across South Asia.

In becoming a tourist landscape, Bengkala has thus acquired a place-based, utopian heritage, including the assumption of full communication access for deaf people in all aspects of life, and equal access to education and employment opportunities. In other words, in the tourist imaginary, Bengkala is a place where there are many deaf people, and they have opportunities equal to hearing people. Yet, in the process of touristifying a place, tourist imaginaries can flatten particular locations and sites into one-dimensional places, erasing the experiences of the people living there, their histories, social relations, and global connections (Devine, 2017; Salazar, 2010). Deaf tourist imaginaries of Bengkala as an isolated deaf utopia erase the complexity of social relations in the village, such as inequalities between deaf and hearing people, as well as its historical and geographical networks with not only nearby villages but also with the south of Bali, the Netherlands, and Australia, where some villagers have migrated for work or marriage.

Additionally, although many deaf tourists imagine that Bengkala has a vital signing ecosystem and that everyday conversations with other (hearing) villagers are effortless because “everyone can sign,” the reality is that Kata Kolok is not “everywhere” in Bengkala, and there is a varying degree of fluency among the hearing villagers. In the following excerpt (quoted at length), James, a deaf tourist from Australia, explains how he came to learn about Bengkala and his experience there:

[On Wahyu’s website] there are different locations listed you can visit, and I saw a blurb about a deaf village so I clicked on it. […] I intended to book Wahyu himself to guide me, but that day there were a lot of people in the group who went off somewhere else, so I had to book a hearing driver for that day, and we went to the deaf village. Honestly, for me it was an anticlimax. I had anticipated something exciting with lots of sign language and had glorified the idea of a “deaf village” with everyone signing and mingling with shops and streets, and so on. What it was in reality was some small houses with a few deaf people sitting around signing a bit. That was all. I felt a bit… deflated. How to say this? It’s not what I thought it would be. […] [Would I give] a referral […] from my visit, would I encourage others to go? Probably not. I felt that for the deaf people living there, having to continuously put up with tourist groups coming and endlessly photographing them was intrusive and interfering with their way of life. And really … well, they wouldn’t like me saying this, but it felt like there just isn’t that much to see there really. Just some houses and a few deaf people, which could be anywhere. We can go and create our own deaf space somewhere. I feel like it is over visited there—there are other places to see. […] Before I saw it in reality, I envisioned an empowered, exciting, lively deaf environment. From my perspective, it was just completely subdued and was not what I had imagined. Maybe that is just my experience and others have more positive experiences. Not for me. (Also see #deaftravel 01:11:56)¹⁰

James was not the only tourist to express these sentiments. Nathalie, a young white deaf tourist from the Netherlands, was also disappointed by her experience in the village, saying that she had hoped to see a strong deaf identity there, but she did not see it (see #deaftravel 01:11:06,¹¹ and see Chapter 9). For this reason, Gio does not take clients to the deaf village because he feels it is like “going to the zoo.” The deaf village is a popular offering for Wahyu, however, and his willingness to take tourists to Bengkala often results in donations being made to the deaf families there, as well as to the deaf schools. Wahyu strongly encourages the tourists he guides to make a donation, highlighting the poverty of the families they visit in Bengkala.

In this section, I expanded on Bengkala, a major destination on the glocal deaf circuit in Bali, noting the reasons why people visit and their experiences there. Bengkala is seen as a deaf utopia in the deaf tourist imaginary, and hearing tourists are equally fascinated by the shared sign language, as well as by deaf dancing. However, deaf visitors to Bengkala are sometimes disappointed because the village does not meet their expectations of a deaf utopia. Deaf Balinese people living in the south, and also some researchers, have expressed concern about the potential impact on Kata Kolok of so many deaf visitors to Bengkala. A deaf teacher at the school for the deaf in Denpasar, the capital of Bali, spoke at some length about language “contamination,” the “spread” of “foreign” sign languages in the village, and sign language endangerment—as did Wahyu (see Chapter 8). Socioeconomic changes in Bengkala have led to increased contact with more dominant urban or national sign languages, which often endangers village sign languages. However, this may be mitigated in Bengkala because of hearing Kata Kolok users who are less exposed to other sign languages (see Kusters’ findings about hearing signers in Adamorobe, a “deaf village” in Ghana, 2015).

Conclusion

There are a few general themes that I identified after data collection, many of which I have already discussed in this chapter and elsewhere in this book. The primary theme is a fascination with difference between deaf people from various national backgrounds, and—both complementing and contrasting with this—how a belief in deaf similitude is a way of bonding across cultural, linguistic, and national differences (see Chapters 7 and 9). Deaf tourism also involves the deaf tourist gaze, which tends to focus on “seeing how they live,” as well as the imaginary of certain places and people as deaf. The desire to “see how they live” is a part of the practice of comparisons, often between nations and cultures (see Chapter 5), and especially where languages are concerned (see Chapter 8), in order to establish deaf similitude across differences.

The global deaf circuit and deaf ecosystem are often entwined. In this chapter, I focused on the two deaf tour guides working in Bali and on the deaf village as a way of understanding different approaches to deaf tourism, the translocal nature of the global deaf circuit, as well as the languaging practices and morality of the deaf ecosystem. The data in this chapter illuminate the importance of experiencing sameness and difference, as well as “authenticity.” There are different ways that authenticity is experienced in deaf tourism in Indonesia, which is illustrated by the differences in the ways that Wahyu and Gio position themselves. Gio, who is a white deaf man from France, positions himself as a “local” by speaking and writing in Indonesian and by emphasizing that he lives in Indonesia, introducing tourists to the Bali Deaf Community, and making use of hearing Indonesian drivers. Gio explained that he sees himself as sharing with people the beautiful places that he has discovered during his travels through Indonesia, and thus sharing his love for Indonesia, which he also shows with his tattoo of the archipelago.

On the other hand, Wahyu, who is an Indonesian-born person, is perceived by some tourists to be more “authentic” because of how well known he is and his “localness.” He is “local” in a different way from Gio. Wahyu advertises himself as Bali Deaf Guide, has lived in Bali with his family for more than 2 decades, and is perceived by tourists as being Balinese; however, he was actually born on another island in Indonesia. Wahyu is also a multilingual cosmopolitan who uses IS and several other languages, but sometimes he is not recognized as such because his customers are focused on his localness in their search for authenticity.

Both Gio and Wahyu’s tours are shaped by their individual positionalities and by the clients they service. These differences (and similarities) shape how they move geographically, as well as their narratives about the places they take deaf tourists to—such as Gio’s desire to avoid the “deaf village” and deaf schools because of the perceived voyeurism, in contrast to Wahyu’s recognition of the desire of many deaf tourists to experience an imagined deaf utopia and the necessity of giving his customers what they want.

In this project, we are interrogating the notion of cosmopolitanism as an overarching framework to understand deaf tourism. Although some of the material covered in this chapter seems to provide examples of the ideal of cosmopolitanism (such as the desire to connect across national and language boundaries, to support local deaf ecosystems, and to establish authentic relationships with “the other”—all desirable forms of cultural capital), the reality of deaf tourism is more complicated and infused with other dynamics and motivations, including a personal desire to experience travel and the potentially voyeuristic impulse to “see how they live” and “consume” commodified cultural tokens. As Salazar (2015) noted, transnational travel is often discursively linked to a greater understanding of and appreciation for difference (i.e., a cosmopolitan outlook); however, deaf tourists often seek out deaf similitude by traversing the glocal deaf circuit, where they sometimes face limits to their cosmopolitan outlook. This can be seen in the case of James and Nathalie, among others, who were disappointed by their experience in Bengkala, which was not the so-called deaf utopia they sought. Deaf cosmopolitanism is imbued with a dynamic interplay of ideals, expectations, and moralities, all of which shape and complicate the mobility and the gaze of deaf tourists on the glocal deaf circuit. The question of who is eligible to “see how [other deaf people] live,” who is permitted to expect hospitality and guiding, and who gets to make judgments about whether other deaf people “count” as “local,” or whether their languaging, actions, and/or the very way they live meet the criteria of the viewer’s preconceived imaginary, demonstrates that sameness work is fraught with power differentials and ambivalences. Our findings with regard to deaf cosmopolitan ideals, expectations, and moralities qualify the idealized notion of deaf cosmopolitanism. In other words, the idealized view of travel as an expansion of knowledge of other people, places, and ways of life through experiencing (indeed, consuming) them has its limitations, because tourists’ experiences are filtered through their guides, and also because the imaginary often does not—maybe cannot—match reality.

1. https://vimeo.com/588352737#t=45m30s

2. https://vimeo.com/588352737#t=41m0s

3. https://www.joelbarish.com/videos/nb-asia/nb-bangladesh/deaf-refugees-at-kutupanlong-refugee-camp/

4. https://vimeo.com/588352737#t=20m10s

5. https://vimeo.com/588352737#t=15m13s

6. https://vimeo.com/588352737#t=1h39m0s

7. https://vimeo.com/588352737#t=36m08s

8. https://vimeo.com/588352737#t=01h35m45s

9. Great Big Story is now defunct, but the video can be seen in #deaftravel: 01:03:52. https://vimeo.com/588352737#t=1h3m52s

10. https://vimeo.com/588352737#t=01h11m56s

11. https://vimeo.com/588352737#t=01h11m06s