Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA.
Alliance for Youth, Women, and Child Survivors, Bagamoyo, Pwani, Tanzania.
Soc Sci Med. 2024 Aug;354:117082. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117082. Epub 2024 Jun 28.
The role of language in maintaining asymmetries of power in global public health and biomedicine has become a central part of the broader movement to "decolonize Global Health." While considering how language engenders inequalities in Global Health, hinders interventions, and inhibits medical care, this article contends that colonially derived theorizations of what language is undergirding top-down health communication efforts labeled as "decolonial" can thwart efforts to make biomedical care and public health clearer in postcolonies. We do this through outlining predicaments found in a linguistic anthropological exploration of cancer terminology in Coastal Tanzania. In the small town of Bagamoyo, saratani-the official translation for cancer in Tanzania created by the government in the 1980s as part of a larger effort of decolonial state-building-is dominantly understood as a different or unequivocal disease than kansa-the English-adapted name. As the dissemination of the term saratani into a linguistic arena where colonially derived word kansa is dominantly registered as the biological disease "cancer," this linguistic disjuncture between saratani and kansa has not only created a plethora of problems for oncological care in Bagamoyo, but also illuminates the perils of creating more just health communication in an unequal global political economy. Through showing how binary conceptualizations of language as "colonial" and "local" can reproduce incommunicability-the rendering of racialized subjects as fundamentally unintelligible in hegemonic regimes-we contend that the afterlives of this past effort to decolonize medical language has important lessons for the present of "decolonizing Global Health." Moving beyond static conceptualizations of language, we argue for a fluid "translanguaging" perspective of medical linguistics that facilitates the dismantlement of incommunicability and the global ordering that creates it.
语言在全球公共卫生和生物医学中维持权力不对称的作用，已成为更广泛的“非殖民化全球健康”运动的核心部分。本文认为，在考虑语言如何在全球健康中产生不平等、阻碍干预措施和抑制医疗保健的同时，殖民化衍生的关于语言是什么的理论，为自上而下的健康传播努力提供了依据，这些努力被贴上了“非殖民化”的标签，但却可能阻碍在后殖民地区使生物医学护理和公共卫生更加清晰的努力。我们通过概述在坦桑尼亚沿海地区对癌症术语进行语言人类学探索中发现的困境来做到这一点。在巴加莫约小镇，saratani——这是 20 世纪 80 年代政府为建立非殖民化国家而创造的坦桑尼亚官方癌症翻译——被理解为一种与 kansa 不同或不同的疾病，而 kansa 是英语改编的名称。随着术语 saratani 传播到一个语言领域，其中殖民化衍生的单词 kansa 被广泛地注册为生物疾病“癌症”，saratani 和 kansa 之间的这种语言脱节不仅给巴加莫约的肿瘤学护理带来了诸多问题，还揭示了在不平等的全球政治经济中创造更公正的健康传播的危险。通过展示语言的“殖民”和“本土”二元概念化如何产生不可沟通性——在霸权政权中，将种族化的主体视为根本不可理解的——我们认为，过去努力使医学语言非殖民化的后遗症，对“非殖民化全球健康”的现在具有重要的启示。我们主张超越语言的静态概念化，采用医学语言学的“语码转换”观点，促进不可沟通性和造成这种不可沟通性的全球秩序的解体。
