ANTH 250 - Language, Culture, and Society

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

This course draws on a wide range of theoretical perspectives in exploring a particular problem, emphasizing the contribution of linguistics and linguistic anthropology to issues that bear on research in a number of disciplines. At issue in each selected course topic are the complex ways in which cultures, societies, and individuals are interrelated in the act of using language within and across particular speech communities.

May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.

Topic for 2026/27a: Language, Culture, and Health. This course examines the relationship among language, culture, and health through a discussion of how health communication affects public health outcomes and experiences of health, illness, and healing. We explore these themes by focusing on topics that include patient-doctor communication, illness narratives, public health campaigns, metaphor, social media discourses, language ideology and minority health disparities, the language of medicalization, communication and healing, and language and embodiment. The course includes an introduction to key areas of research in linguistic anthropology that examine how language influences cultural concepts, the way different cultures think about the world, and, inversely, how cultural concepts and values are reflected in the way a given culture speaks. We also examine how language and communication both restrict and enable access to health care, and how they both shape public health outcomes.

Two 1-hour periods.

Course Format: CLS