Language and Health in Action

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.

1 - Everyone is "Mom": Speaking Maternalism in US Emergency Departments
2 - Talking about Pain in Traditional Korean Medicine Clinics
3 - Autism Diagnostics as White Public Space in US Clinics
4 - Health Care Access for Mayan Communities in Kansas
5 - Of Worlds and Words: Medical Interpretation in a US Primary Care Clinic
6 - Translating the Invisible: Intercultural Health Facilitators in Indigenous Chile
7 - Kansa, Saratani, and Biocommunicability in Coastal Tanzania
8 - The Circulation of Psychoanalytic Discourses beyond the Clinic in Buenos Aires
9 - Facing HIV Stigma with Scientific Medicine in a Bio-Speech Community in South Africa
10 - "I'm still here!": Listening to African American Silences and Narratives of Life on Dialysis in Boston
11 - Water Everywhere, but Is It Safe to Drink?: Risk, Perception, and Public Health in Guatemala
12 - Introducing Xka Pastora, One of the World's Newest "Drugs"
13 - In the Spirit, in the Flesh: Performative Language, Embodiment, and Sustaining Recovery in Appalachia
14 - Caught between Stories of Healing and Migration: Rehabilitation Care for Migrants with Amputations in Mexico
15 - Learning to Experience Dying as a Part of Living: An Individual and Collective Journey

Dr. Lynnette Arnold is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is a linguistic anthropologist with a primary area of focus in the Americas, where she has conducted research on language, care, and migration. Dr. Arnold works to create interdisciplinary conversations about the social power of language, demonstrating that attention to linguistic practices can generate consequential new understandings of pressing current issues. This approach is exemplified in her monograph, Living Together Across Borders: Communicative Care in Transnational Salvadoran Families (Oxford University Press, Studies in the Anthropology of Language, 2024). Dr. Jennifer R. Guzmán is Associate Professor of Anthropology at SUNY Geneseo, where she coordinates the Interdisciplinary Program in Sociomedical Sciences. Her research focuses on how people confront health challenges and advocate for themselves within systems that are harmful to health, including intercultural health efforts in Chile and immigrant/labor rights organizing in New York. She has studied clinical interaction in conventional, Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) and Integrative Medicine (IM) , and ethnomedical settings. Dr. Guzmán is co-editor of Ethnographic Insights on Latin America and the Caribbean, an edited collection designed for undergraduate teaching. Dr. Emily Avera is an assistant professor of anthropology at Colgate University. She received her PhD from Brown University and holds graduate degrees from Leiden University and University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on the sociocultural dimensions of health, race and racialization in medicine, and transplant and transfusion medicine, primarily in the South African context. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation and Fulbright IIE. Her scholarly interests include the intersections of medical and linguistic anthropology, science and technology studies approaches (science and society), critical race studies, development studies, and global health. Dr. Anna I. Corwin is Associate Professor and Chair of the Women's Spirituality Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA and is a recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Templeton World Charity Foundation for her research on aging, well-being, and religious expertise.