Language and Medical Expertise

3 units

Language plays a constitutive role in the creation and communication of medical expertise in all cultures, as well as across cultures. The goal of this course is to introduce students to the discourse-centered approach to medicine found in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. How is medical authority negotiated in interactions between doctors/healers and patients? How do authoritative narratives and discourses structure cultural understandings of disease, health, wellbeing, and the body? What role does language and its use play in legitimizing certain forms of medicine while delegimizing others, especially in medically-plural societies? Does Western medicine differ from non-Western medicine with respect to the way it is created and communicated? How do ideologies of language and communication shape the way medical representations circulate in society, including across socio-cultural boundaries, as in acts of translation? How are new institutional forms of communication, like mass media and the internet, reshaping medical expertise around the world? We will begin the course with the role of narrative in the construction of medical knowledge and perception, then move to the micro-analyses of authoritative language in the patient-doctor medical encounter, and end the course by turning to the macro-analysis of medical institutions, exploring them in relation to the kinds of expert texts they produce and circulate. The course will draw on theoretical readings and ethnographic research conducted in many places in order to develop a cross-cultural understanding of the issues.