Uncovering a tragic flaw in revolutionary health policies: From health and communicative inequities to communicative justice in health
Received:
26 September 2016,
Accepted:
20 October 2016,
Published:
10 October 2017
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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ISSN 1669-2381 (print version) | ISSN 1851-8265 (electronic version) | 2250-5334 (english edition)
Editor in chief: Viviana Martinovich
Publisher: Universidad Nacional de Lanús
Rector: Daniel Rodriguez Bozzani
29 de Septiembre 3901, Remedios de Escalada, Lanús (B1826GLC), Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina