[Linganth] Charles Briggs on Incommunicable

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today on the blog, Daniel Krugman asks Charles Briggs about his new book,
Incommunicable.

campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: In *Incommunicable*, Charles L. Briggs examines the
long-standing presumptions that medical discourse translates easily across
geographic, racial, and class boundaries. Bringing linguistic and medical
anthropology into conversation with Black and decolonial theory, he
theorizes the failure in health communication as incommunicability, which
negatively affects all patients, doctors, and healthcare providers. Briggs
draws on W. E. B. Du Bois and the work of three philosopher-physicians—John
Locke, Frantz Fanon, and Georges Canguilhem—to show how cultural models of
communication and health have historically racialized people of color as
being incapable of communicating rationally and understanding biomedical
concepts. He outlines incommunicability through a study of COVID-19
discourse, in which health professionals defined the disease based on
scientific medical knowledge in ways that reduced varieties of
nonprofessional knowledge about COVID-19 to “misinformation” and
“conspiracy theories.” This dismissal of nonprofessional knowledge led to a
failure of communication that eroded trust in medical expertise. Building
on efforts by social movements and coalitions of health professionals and
patients to craft more just and equitable futures, Briggs helps imagine
health systems and healthcare discourses beyond the oppressive weight of
communicability and the stigma of incommunicability.
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