Briggs Charles L
a Department of Anthropology , University of California , Berkeley , California , USA.
Med Anthropol. 2017 May-Jun;36(4):287-304. doi: 10.1080/01459740.2017.1299721. Epub 2017 Mar 3.
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.
本文从一个不同的角度探讨医疗护理问题，通过人种志研究来观察它是如何受到控制知识传播权力的结构差异的影响。我关注的是被归类为“原住民”的人群对一场在委内瑞拉雨林中导致38名儿童和年轻人死亡的流行病所进行的调查。我追溯了健康/沟通不平等是如何构建临床互动、文件、流行病学调查、新闻报道以及与治疗师的对话的，从而阻碍了对这种临床上被认定为狂犬病的流行病的识别。尽管玻利瓦尔社会主义政府提供了医疗护理渠道，但专业人员诋毁了父母在护理和沟通方面的贡献，并将语言之间复杂、不平等的关系简化为实际的翻译问题。通过指出与美国社会运动的相似之处，我认为回应健康领域对沟通正义的要求需要认识到健康不平等是如何与健康/沟通不平等交织在一起的。这个印刷符号斜杠指出了挑战学科界限划分工作的重要性，这种界限划分将对这些问题的研究归入医学人类学和语言人类学中互不重叠的讨论范畴。
