Anthropological Linguistics, Health, and Healthcare
Abstract
Communicative practices manifest, generate, or reconfigure social, political, and human-nonhuman borders that shape health and healthcare. In this chapter, we bring together literature from linguistic anthropology that attends to language's role in boundary-making and from cultural anthropology's borderlands theory that articulates how geopolitical, social, political, and economic borders are made and remade through linguistic practices. Using three case studies, we demonstrate simultaneous processes of linguistic disadvantage, or who has the power to define and redefine meaning through communicative practices, that reinforces and reproduces health/healthcare inequality along traditional identity borders, and the potential of communicative performativity to deborder or reborder identities to promote health and wellbeing, especially among vulnerable populations. Our case studies are among undocumented immigrant patients with end-stage renal disease in the south Texas borderlands; indigenous Maya in the Guatemalan highlands, and LGBTQI+ patients at an anal cancer research clinic in Chicago.
Publication Title
The Handbook of Language in Public Health and Healthcare
Recommended Citation
Melo, M., Pezzia, C., Robertson, W., & Fleuriet, K. (2024). Anthropological Linguistics, Health, and Healthcare. The Handbook of Language in Public Health and Healthcare, 59-76. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119853855.ch4
