Full Description
Health and wellbeing are profoundly shaped by communication processes. Language and Health in Action explores these interconnections by bringing together cutting-edge global scholarship from linguistic and medical anthropology. The book highlights the centrality of language practices and language ideologies in how professionals, individuals, families, and communities navigate illness and pursue health across the lifecourse, in clinical contexts, and beyond. Each chapter includes immersive examples from qualitative and ethnographic research, captured in clear and accessible prose. The volume includes a breadth of perspectives on public and global health that include topics such as infectious disease and chronic illness, mental health and addiction, disability, dying, and healing. Contributions shed light on urban and rural settings and the experiences of immigrants, indigenous communities, and other racialized populations. Chapters profile research conducted in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, South Korea, Mexico, South Africa, Tanzania, and the United States.
The book is organized into five thematic sections: clinical interaction, language access, community and communicability, language and environment, and healing practices. To support student readers and instructors, the book begins with an introduction to key terms in social scientific approaches to language and health, and each chapter includes a series of discussion and reflection questions. The volume demonstrates that linguistic and communicative practices, which are often taken for granted, nevertheless have far-reaching consequences for health outcomes.
Contents
Section 1. Clinical Interaction: Editors' Introduction
1: Hannah S. Noblewolf and Lisa Wolf: Everyone is "Mom": Speaking Maternalism in US Emergency Departments
2: Hyemin Lee: Talking about Pain in Traditional Korean Medicine Clinics
3: Stephanie Keeney Parks: Autism Diagnostics as White Public Space in US Clinics
Section 2. Language Access: Editors' Introduction
4: Rachel Showstack, Raúl Rangel Fernández, and Margarita Francisco: Health Care Access for Mayan Communities in Kansas
5: Lissie Wahl: Of Worlds and Words: Medical Interpretation in a US Primary Care Clinic
6: Paula F. Saravia and Jorge Tibor Gutiérrez: Translating the Invisible: Intercultural Health Facilitators in Indigenous Chile
Section 3. Community and Communicability: Editors' Introduction
7: Daniel W. Krugman and Mohamed Yunus Rafiq: Kansa, Saratani, and Biocommunicability in Coastal Tanzania
8: Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: The Circulation of Psychoanalytic Discourses beyond the Clinic in Buenos Aires
9: Steven P. Black: Facing HIV Stigma with Scientific Medicine in a Bio-Speech Community in South Africa
Section 4. Language and Environment: Editors' Introduction
10: Merav Shohet and Insa M. Schmidt: "I'm still here!": Listening to African American Silences and Narratives of Life on Dialysis in Boston
11: T. S. Harvey: Water Everywhere, but Is It Safe to Drink?: Risk, Perception, and Public Health in Guatemala
12: Paja Faudree: Introducing Xka Pastora, One of the World's Newest "Drugs"
Section 5. Healing Practices: Editors' Introduction
13: Abby Mack: In the Spirit, in the Flesh: Performative Language, Embodiment, and Sustaining Recovery in Appalachia
14: Claudia Morales: Caught between Stories of Healing and Migration: Rehabilitation Care for Migrants with Amputations in Mexico
15: Marjorie Harness Goodwin, Federica Raia and Mario Deng: Learning to Experience Dying as a Part of Living: An Individual and Collective Journey
