Towards Communicative Justice in Health

This article approaches care from a different angle by looking ethnographically at how it is shaped by structural differences in the power to control the circulation of knowledge. I focus on an investigation conducted by people classified as "indigenous", of an epidemic that killed 38 chil...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inMedical anthropology Vol. 36; no. 4; pp. 287 - 304
Main Author Briggs, Charles L.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Routledge 01.05.2017
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Adult
Anthropology
Anthropology, Medical
Child
Child, Preschool
Epidemics
Epidemiology
Ethnography
Female
Health care
Health care access
Health disparities
health inequalities
Health services
Healthcare Disparities - ethnology
Humans
indigenous health
Inequality
Justice
Languages
linguistic anthropology
Male
Media coverage
Medical anthropology
Medicine
Medicine, Traditional
Native peoples
News
Power
Rabies
Rabies - ethnology
Rainforests
Social Justice
Social movements
Socialism
Translation
Venezuela - ethnology
Young adults
linguistic anthropology
Epidemics
rabies
health inequalities
indigenous health
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Summary:This article approaches care from a different angle by looking ethnographically at how it is shaped by structural differences in the power to control the circulation of knowledge. I focus on an investigation conducted by people classified as "indigenous", of an epidemic that killed 38 children and young adults in a Venezuelan rainforest. I trace how health/communicative inequities structured clinical interactions, documents, epidemiological investigations, news stories, and dialogues with healers, thwarting the identification of the epidemic, clinically identified as rabies. Although the Bolivarian socialist government provided access to care, professionals denigrated parents' contributions to care and communication and reduced complex, unequal relations between languages to practical problems of translation. Pointing to parallels with US social movements, I suggest that responding to demands for communicative justice in health requires seeing how health inequities are entangled with health/communicative inequities. The typographical slash points to importance of challenging the subdisciplinary boundary-work that relegates their study to non-overlapping conversations in medical and linguistic anthropology.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
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ISSN:0145-9740
1545-5882
DOI:10.1080/01459740.2017.1299721