Incommunicable: Decolonizing perspectives on language and health

Abstract This article fosters a new relationship between linguistic and medical anthropology by decolonizing foundational conceptions of language and health. It reintroduces John Locke as a philosopher‐physician who used diagnosis of language disorders to impose a regime of communicability—reducing language to exchanging transparent, stable, purely referential signs. By deeming white, elite, able‐bodied European men alone capable of enacting this self‐help program, he connected communicability to whiteness and turned it into a means of evaluating and subordinating all others. Communicability also enabled him to shape how physicians produce knowledge in empiricist, atheoretical, observational fashion. I then trace physician‐philosopher Frantz Fanon's critique of how colonialism denies communicability to racialized subjects. Fanon's analysis of colonial medicine shows how clinical encounters can produce incommunicable subjects. Given that constructions of communicability have become highly visible features of medical education and practice and social‐scientific research on it, the article extends Fanon's analysis of physician‐patient communication more generally to ask if contemporary efforts to regiment clinical interactions and assess the communicable success of patients and doctors alike turn them into sites of incommunicability—assessments of communicable failure—for both parties. The article ends by imagining worlds beyond the oppressive weight of communicability and the stigma of incommunicability.