The Politics of Communicability

This chapter discusses the communicability framework in rethinking three topics that figure significantly in medical anthropology and adjacent fields – narrative, doctor‐patient interaction, and health communication. It explores why health news is of greater importance to medical anthropology than is generally recognized and suggests why its marginalization limits analytic and ethnographic advances. Dominant communicabilities transform the structural effects of unhealthy health policies into seeming failures of knowledge and communication, thereby co‐producing what Paul Farmer calls "pathologies of power." "Doctor‐patient interaction" similarly forms a particularly visible site where communicative/medical binaries are bridged; it also provides another instance where research has fostered changes in clinical practice. Nevertheless, it bears a paradoxical relationship to medical/communicative binaries, given that it defines clinical, epidemiological, and public health institutions primarily as loci of knowledge, not communication. Mediatization enters deeply into the production of racial inequities. In US health media, projections of idealized health‐consumers seldom mention race explicitly.