Language and Health

Abstract

Defined broadly, the anthropological study of language and health is as old as the field itself. In early writings, medicine and language were often treated as core aspects of cultural traditions. Since these early influences, four anthropological approaches to this topic have developed. The first approach, rooted in cognitive and psychological anthropology, examines cultural models of illness, explanations of illness, and narratives about illness. While this research provides significant insights into the relationship between language and understandings of experiences with illness, much of this work assumes monolingualism or, in some cases, includes multilingual speakers but does not explicitly address multilingualism as a facet of analysis. However, some scholarship examines the linguistic and experiential dynamics that occur when an explanatory model is shifted wholesale from one linguistic and cultural context to another. The second approach, based in medical anthropology, theorizes how medical discourses (in the sense of the limits of what persons might say or could say in specific medical contexts) shape the development of culturally specific subjectivities. In this research, many scholars expand on the idea that medical systems are cultural systems, especially in their analysis of the disjuncture between the authoritative stance of scientific medicine—with claims to be outside of or beyond culture—and the reality that scientific medicine is itself cultural and is embedded in distinct cultural contexts. Here, the bio– prefix (as in biopolitics, biopower, and biosociality) points toward the profound power of scientific medicine to reshape human bodies and thus human relationships, which become mediated by scientific medical discourses. The third approach, connected to linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and conversation analysis, analyzes how health discourses (in the sense of documented linguistic and conversational patterns spoken in recorded health encounters) construct inequities and constitute cultural understandings of health and illness. Anthropological scholarship builds on the examination of the conversational construction of medical encounters in numerous ways, among them a discussion of what happens when individuals from marginalized cultural and linguistic backgrounds enter health care spaces. Finally, a novel framework links elements of the previous three approaches in interdisciplinary configurations to argue that language and health are co-constituted. This includes work on the pragmatics and ideologies of recovery and care, the discursive constitution of public and global health, medical translation, and health/communicative inequities.