Uncovering a tragic flaw in revolutionary health policies: From health and communicative inequities to communicative justice in health

https://doi.org/10.18294/sc.2017.1152

Published 10 October 2017 Open Access


Charles L. Briggs PhD in Anthropology. Professor, Anthropology Department, University of California, Berkeley, USA. image/svg+xml



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Keywords:

Healthcare Inequalities, Epidemiology, Communication Barriers, Communications Media, Venezuela

Abstract


This article analyzes a contradiction facing efforts by left-leaning governments in Latin America to transform health into a fundamental social right. Policies and practices that confront health inequities generally fail to address health/communicative inequities, hierarchical distributions of rights to shape what counts as legitimate knowledge of health. This ethnographic analysis focuses on an epidemic of a mysterious disease – identified clinically as bat-transmitted rabies – in the Delta Amacuro rainforest of Venezuela in 2007-2008, tracing how parents who lost 1-3 children faced acute health/communicative inequities in clinical settings, epidemiological investigations, work with healers, news coverage, health policy, and health communication. Taking as a point of departure rainforest residents’ demands for communicative justice in health, the analysis draws on Menéndez’s notion of autoatención in exploring how health/communicative labor is co-produced with the labor of care.


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