Language and Health in Action

Language and Health in Action is an accessibly written edited volume designed to introduce anthropology and pre-health students to the key ways that language shapes health and medicine.

Health and wellbeing are profoundly shaped by communication processes. Language and Health in Action explores these interconnections by bringing together cutting-edge global scholarship from linguistic and medical anthropology. The book highlights the centrality of language practices and language ideologies in how professionals, individuals, families, and communities navigate illness and pursue health across the lifecourse, in clinical contexts, and beyond. Each chapter includes immersive examples from qualitative and ethnographic research, captured in clear and accessible prose. The volume includes a breadth of perspectives on public and global health that include topics such as infectious disease and chronic illness, mental health and addiction, disability, dying, and healing. Contributions shed light on urban and rural settings and the experiences of immigrants, indigenous communities, and other racialized populations. Chapters profile research conducted in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, South Korea, Mexico, South Africa, Tanzania, and the United States.

The book is organized into five thematic sections: clinical interaction, language access, community and communicability, language and environment, and healing practices. To support student readers and instructors, the book begins with an introduction to key terms in social scientific approaches to language and health, and each chapter includes a series of discussion and reflection questions. The volume demonstrates that linguistic and communicative practices, which are often taken for granted, nevertheless have far-reaching consequences for health outcomes.

1. What kinds of language practices promote health and support healing?
2. What kinds of language practices are detrimental to health and impede healing?
3. How do institutions and communities grapple with multilingualism, interpretation, and linguistic diversity in healthcare?
4. How does information about health and illness circulate in communities? What factors shape this process?

There is a growing subfield of research in anthropology that focuses on issues of language and communication in health and medicine. The foreword of Language and Health in Action (written by UC Berkeley anthropologist Charles Briggs) provides a historical overview of this work. The afterword of our volume (written by UNC Chapel Hill anthropologist Mara Buchbinder) speaks to the value of narrative training in medical school. A “Key Concepts” chapter in the book (written by the co-editors) introduces readers to foundational theory about health and language from social scientific research.

Much of the existing linguistic-medical anthropological scholarship is written in academic prose that makes it inaccessible to non-experts, including undergraduate students who are looking to enter health professions. We (co-editors of the volume) designed this book to feature all new, cutting-edge scholarship and worked to ensure that the book would also work well for undergraduate teaching.

Over three years, we worked closely with contributing chapter authors through multiple cycles of revision. During this time, two of us co-editors taught the book manuscript (at University of Massachusetts, Amherst and at Colgate University) and solicited feedback from undergraduate students in the courses. Revision of every part of the book benefitted from the input these students provided. So far, students have responded very positively to the book.

Listen to Vocal Fries podcast with the editors

Read CaMP Anthropology blog post by the editors

Lynette Arnold, Jennifer R Guzmán, Emily Avera, and Anna I Corwin (editors). 2026. Language and Health in Action. Oxford University Press.