Paper short abstract:

An epidemic in a Venezuelan rainforest went unexplained for a year. This paper follows indigenous leaders investigating how rabid vampire bats and communicative inequities between indigenous patients and doctors, epidemiologists, and journalists thwarted diagnosis and deepened the epidemic's impact.

Paper long abstract:

This paper describes an inadvertent encounter in 2008 with a mysterious disease, spirits, chickens, vampire bats, clinicians, healers, epidemiologists, the international media, dying bodies, and indigenous leaders in the Orinoco rainforest of Venezuela. Indigenous leaders recruited Briggs, along with Clara Mantini-Briggs MD MPH, to join them in investigating an epidemic that had stumped clinicians and epidemiologists. Including two political leaders, a healer, a nurse, a physician, and an anthropologist, the team documented 38 deaths, presented a preliminary diagnosis, and took the results to the national government and the international media.

In 1992-1993, a cholera epidemic in the same area killed some 500 people and inscribed residents' status in biopolitical terms as unsanitary subjects, as purportedly incapable of understanding modern hygiene and medical discourse due to the persistence of a premodern culture. When physicians and epidemiologists failed to diagnose a new epidemic that started in 2007, parents pressed local leaders to conduct their own investigation. Collective forms of knowledge production that included indigenous healing, personal narratives, laments, epidemiology, and clinical medicine pointed to rabies as the pathogen and vampire bats as the vector. Beyond diagnosing the disease, the process pinpointed how inequities in the distribution of rights to communicate about health—from clinical encounters to epidemiological inquiry to health policies to news coverage of health problems—engenders persistent problems of global health and renders them more invisible and more intractable.

Paper short abstract:

This paper concerns a linguistic anthropology of the presentation of evidence by Kurdish refugees in London. Evidence-based medical practice as well as human rights work, are thereby considered from the perspective of a linguistic anthropology of evidentiality.

Paper long abstract:

This paper concerns the articulation of chronic pain by Kurdish women in North London. As survivors of human rights abuses in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, Kurdish women suffer from 'burning hearts'. They regularly present this predicament in primary health care settings. Their testimonies concern chronic pain and are presented on the basis of a Kurdish linguistic ideology. As a linguistic anthropologist, I focus on reported speech and the allocation of responsibility within such discourses. The narratological expectations of the Kurdish language include an epistemology - an indication of the sources and limits of knowledge - and an understanding of the nature of evidence. My paper discusses evidentials in Kurmanci, the Northern dialect of Kurdish. Evidentials are the grammatical markers that indicate the kind of evidence that exists for a statement. Kurdish is an Indo-European language, with an extensive history of contact with Ottoman Turkish, modern Turkish, Persian and Arabic. These historical layers are sedimented in the evidential system of Kurdish, and call for a linguistic anthropology. This analysis then needs to be juxtaposed to a consideration of our need for evidence within both medical and human rights practice. These needs go along with modern language ideologies and make particular demands on Kurdish traditions of oral history and verbal art. This paper thereby addresses the significant amount of 'irrelevant testimony', as it is commonly called, on the basis of an anthropology of evidentiality.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation highlights the regulatory processes of language supply and demand in the Swiss healthcare industry. By tracing the trajectories of care workers, we examine the role of language in the production and reproduction of social inequalities within the current political economy.

Paper long abstract:

Using the healthcare industry in Switzerland as our terrain, we aim to uncover the conditions in which particular configurations of language proficiency and speakers become desired commodities, as the demands of globally mobile patients are managed, the needs of migrant patients are accommodated and the linguistic, symbolic and cultural capitals of healthcare workers are regulated and exchanged. This is based on the assumption that the transnational movement of patients and workers fundamentally changes the role and value of languages in healthcare, raising new questions about the management of language in the current political economy. Our research examines the conditions in which language skills are used to characterize the desirable personal qualities, job scopes and specific tasks of healthcare workers, making linguistic resources serve as gatekeepers of labor as well as instrumental tools necessary in the care for diverse patients. By tracing the trajectories of healthcare workers who rely and capitalize on their linguistic resources, our research intends to highlight the role of language in the production and reproduction of social inequalities in 1) international offices that serve medical tourists, 2) migrant-friendly care units that cater to immigrant patients and 3) human resources departments responsible for sourcing multilingual workers. In doing so, we aim to contribute to our understanding of fine-grain processes that define the organization of linguistic resources, regulate the demand and supply of workers, and determine that value of certain languages and forms of language practice. In turn, this also has implications for the co-constitution of language and healthcare ideologies.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation synthesizes scholarship on language ideologies of scale, transnational aid amid neoliberal governance, and embodied experience to discuss how the experienced pragmatics of everyday performance were linked to the development of HIV support amid stigma and inequality in South Africa.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation synthesizes scholarship on language ideologies of scale, transnational aid amid neoliberal governance, and embodied experience to suggest a model of the linguistic constitution of "support." This is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Durban, South Africa with a Zulu gospel choir that was an HIV support group, activist organization and performance troupe. The choir was notable as a success story amid stigma and inequality. Still, group members were peripheral to the uneven global circulation of money, medication, and discourses associated with the AIDS pandemic. Access to these resources was mediated by gatekeepers—doctors, international aid workers, and researchers—who valued choir members' abilities to perform "traditional" Zulu music and disclose their HIV positive statuses. Aid, research, and biomedicine thus opened up spaces for communication amid stigma and the "scaling up" of HIV discourses while simultaneously constraining linguistic practices in those spaces.

The presentation examines how choir members joked, told stories and sang about HIV, drawing from ideological resources associated with biomedicine and international aid. Building on phenomenologically oriented scholarship on attentional modification, medical ethnomusicology work on healing and flexibility, and now-classic literature on the anthropology of performance, the presentation suggests a model of how the experienced pragmatics of everyday performance were linked to the long-term development of support amid stigma and inequality. This contributes a perspective on the experience of performance, and more generally on the moment-to-moment temporal "unfolding" of communication and healing, to an emerging body of research at the intersection of linguistic, psychological and medical anthropology.

Paper short abstract:

This talk discusses competing medical constructions of – and engagements with – the new “drug” salvia, aka the plant Salvia divinorum. I show how diverse linguistic and other practices produce different valuations of salvia, with significant implications for it surrounding social communities.

Paper long abstract:

In this talk, I discuss competing constructions of medicinal knowledge about Salvia divinorum, one of the world's newest "drugs." This research is part of a larger book project examining how linguistic and material practices jointly shape the emerging global trade in salvia, a hallucinogenic variety of mint. Mexico's indigenous Mazatec people have used salvia for centuries in religious curing rituals; shamanic knowledge of the plant thus stems from long traditions of local use, but has also been shaped by the recent rise in interest among psychedelic-seeking tourists and an accompanying recreational drug market in the plant. At the same time, salvia is the site of active biomedical research: salvia's active compound binds to a different neuroreceptor than do most hallucinogens, making it attractive to pharmaceutical researchers interested in exploiting the compound's chemical pathways to treat such maladies as chronic pain, schizophrenia, and opiate addiction. I examine how these two communities of practice - Mazatec shamans and their clients in Mexico, biomedical researchers and their study participants in the U.S - differentially saturate the plant with meaning through diverse medical and linguistic practices. I conclude by suggesting that notwithstanding the disciplinary barriers to such a methodology, attending jointly to medical and linguistic practices offers new insights into this and related cases where global trade involves moving goods across not only international boundaries but also across borders marked by ethnic differences, power discrepancies, and competing medicinal epistemologies anchored in divergent matrixes of linguistic practice.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the narrative exchanges posted on the Polish online board devoted to ADHD in children. The forum is understood as a form of biosociality, a space where uncertainty and social conflicts are represented and managed and where identities, informed by the transnational flows of biomedical knowledge and practice, are interactively engendered.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents an analysis of narratives posted on the Polish online forum devoted to the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). This online community of speakers consists mainly of parents of children diagnosed, or suspected of suffering from ADHD, as well as experts, who direct the exchanges, navigate the uncertainty and represent an authoritative voice.

Joint in an interactive semiotic effort, the online narrators actively build a theory of and stabilize a particular imagery of ADHD understood as a medical condition. In this paper I focus on the sense of security derived from the compliance to the dominant story promoted by the community. I claim that the discussion board mediates and supports the transnational institutionalized knowledges of ADHD (produced by the WHO, implemented by the Polish state bureaucracy) and normalizes them.

Eventually, I look at the politics of narration characterizing the forum. I ask about ways in which, through efforts of differently positioned forum participants, certain authoritative accounts are accomplished and how they constrain and frame subsequent discussions. I notice how little value is attached to the stories produced by children, and how children hold no control over the process by which the ADHD story is told and their identites are framed by the adult online speakers.

The forum is understood as a social space where social conflict is represented and mediated (parent-child, parent-doctor, parent/child-school) as well as it is read as a point where identities, informed by the transnational flows of biomedical knowledge and practice, are interactively produced.

Paper short abstract:

The paper experiments with Actor-Network-Theory to turn language into an actant in an attempt to re-entangle language with the world. Empirically I analyze and compare safety protocols and scripts with their implementation in actual medical practice in the current Ebola epidemic.

Paper long abstract:

As caregivers, medical staff is highly exposed to infection with Ebola. The unprecedented dimension of the current West African outbreak has intensified attention to the safety and survival of medical staff, amongst others through scripts and protocols and their strict implementation. For example, the Swiss air-ambulance Rega has developed a mobile Ebola-transport system that is operated by three staff: two doctors and one supervisor who reads from a script the moves in order to control the medical security of the doctors.

Starting from a praxeological perspective I compare scripts with film material from the field and analyse which activities are understood to be in need of control, and which ones are not. As it is neither practical nor possible to script every activity, their inherent underspecification necessarily leads to situations which are managed through other, pre-existing resources by the actors.

These medical practices are underpinned by linguistic ideologies that assume the controllability of action through language. I interpret them as a variation of the "word - world distinction" in which language and action are conceptualized as independent but causally connected entities. Because they appear as entities they can be seen in a Latourian sense as actors/actants which enter particular and situated assemblages to form securitized medical practices. Under this perspective, these micro-practices can be connected to larger concerns around the securitization of global health. More importantly, I am interested in experimenting with Actor-Network-Theory in an attempt to re-entangle language with "the world" by challenging black-boxed and seemingly commonsensical assumptions about language.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the communication between a doctor, underaged patients and their parents in a paediatrician’s practice in a superdiverse Berlin district. I am investigating how specific symptom categories from the ICD10 are communicated between doctor and patients in different languages and dialects.

Paper long abstract:

In the German Health System nine medical preventive examinations (Untersuchung 1- 9/U1-U9) are recommended and demanded by the German Government for children from birth until the age of six. These check-ups, that are meant to test and examine the physiological, cognitive and psychological status of the child, are conducted by paediatricians. The detection of social, emotional and behavioural problems is especially part of the U8 (age 46-48 months). For the diagnosis of such problems the ICD10 is the standard code, the vague classification of ICD10 f94 (Disorders of social functioning with onset specific to childhood and adolescence) is here used to express a number of 'disorders'.

This paper discusses how in a paediatricians practice in Berlin Kreuzberg, a multi-ethnic, -multi-religious and multi-linguistic district, the ICD10f94 code is understood by the paediatrician, and then filled with meaning, re-interpreted and reified in the communication with his patients and especially their parents. The paper describes how within the course of a consultation the communication changes between different languages (German, Turkish, English) and dialects (standard German, Berlin dialect) and with which words and descriptions the rather complex diagnostics is expressed and negotiated.

Paper short abstract:

The global spread of Islamic medicine had to adjust to new technologies long before the digital communication revolution. So-called interruptions did not necessarily disturb medical communication and treatment but regulated it like prosody, an example of which is given of Muslim healers in East Africa.

Paper long abstract:

'Global public health' needs to include the great sweep of Islamic and other indigenous healing systems as well as that of biomedicine. The paper accordingly draws on material from the East African coastal area and compares two kinds of healers operating before the current use of mobile phones and the internet. It is therefore a snapshot taken before the digital communication revolution and so offers itself for later comparison. Though both Muslim, one healer is rural and speaks both the lingua franca, Swahili, and a local vernacular, while the other is urban and speaks both a Swahili high diatype and Arabic. Although distinguished ethno-linguistically by clients, their two healing traditions are in effect a continuum of diagnostic and treatment possibilities. The Arabo-Swahili healer constantly receives phone calls from his landline which he answers while treating a patient, and the Mijikenda healer punctuates his spirit invocations and treatment with movements and unrelated comments to those around him. These interruptions or punctuations are incorporated in the medical discourse. They stage the whole therapeutic process by acting as its meta-prosody.

Paper short abstract:

Relying on video-recorded family interactions and interview data with parents from a larger study of thirty-two dual-earner families with children living in or near Los Angeles, California, this paper explores what is lost in dominant discourses that construe health as primarily an individual-level concern.

Paper long abstract:

Relying on video and interview data from a larger study of thirty-two dual-earner families with children living in or near Los Angeles, California, this paper explores health as enacted in family interactions and in parental talk about matters of health and well-being. Several examples, drawn from the larger corpus, show how distinctive views of family health and well-being are revealed in everyday family interactions. Despite the observed variability in health as enacted, parents typically convey widely shared and conventional views about health and well-being in interviews and other talk, largely in alignment with public health discourse in the United States. I consider the implications of this study for discourses that construe health as primarily an individual-level responsibility. Without dismissing the import of health as self-related experience or as an individual-level concern, this paper shifts attention to matters of health as lived in concert with others in quotidian social settings and the analytic challenge of understanding matters of health and well-being as embedded in everyday life and bound up in familial relations of care. As part of the discussion, I explore the linkages and tensions that inhere in bridging methodologies and analytic perspectives from linguistic and medical anthropology to study how family health takes shape in everyday engagements.

Paper short abstract:

In Chinese lexicography sounds and meaning tend to be intricately related, and this is so also in some Chinese materia medica texts. The sound of the word qing, 1st tone, can mean light, transparent, bluegreen, pure, clear, clean, depending on the graph with which it is written.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore to what extent such a sound like qing might inform us about perceived materialities of the ingredients of Song dynasty recipes (ca 11th century). I will first present what Merleau-Ponty says about meaning-making with words (phenomenology of language), and how his understanding of the process of meaning making differs from uncovering meaning that is considered to be encoded in a word (semiotics). I will then present an example where the sound qing as the prefix for plant ingredients/names in certain recipes can be read as gesturing towards the efficaciousness of the recipe. Rather than considering this phenomenon as onomatopoetic, and hence an exceptional kind of meaning making in linguistics, it will open up discussion about how to make sense of such phenomena.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explore how the staff at the admission desk of a public hospital talk about their job as giving real or fake appointments. The idiom used to refer to this task reveals aspects of healthcare that go beyond access and entitlement and it shows how health-related deservingness is reckoned.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I analyze the practices and discourses of administrative staff at the admission desk in one public primary healthcare centre in Madrid (Spain). At the admission desk, different dynamics take place to allocate appointments with doctors and nurses, which in this context are scarce resources. Frequently, administrative staff refer to the appointments that patients ask for with an idiom of real versus fake appointments, depending of their own interpretations about the way people ask for the appointments. I aim to disentangle the multiple factors that discursively construct some appointments as real and others as fake. Competing ideas about the professional role either as gatekeepers or facilitators of healthcare provisions play a fundamental role in the formation of this idiom of real versus fake. Similarly, workload and the relationships with other members of the healthcare staff modulate the way admission staff talk about their work. Beyond issues of access and entitlements, the idiom of real versus fakes appointments reveals the different ways administrative staff reckon health-related deservingness of the potential patients at the healthcare centre.