ABSTRACT
Our health is shaped by our culture (Winkelman 2008). Anthropologists have long included health beliefs and practices in their descriptions of cultural groups. Beginning in the 1960s, however, groundbreaking approaches to health and health care ushered in a more intense focus on the relationship between culture and health and laid the groundwork for the emerging field of medical anthropology (Singer and Baer 2011). The nexus between culture and health that medical anthropologists have highlighted, furthermore, has attracted the interest of other research areas, including applied linguistics (De Bot and Makoni 2005; Jacobson 2002; Martínez 2008, 2009, 2010a, 2013a; McPherron and Ramanathan 2011; Ramanathan 2009). The linguistic practices in which health-related cultural perspectives, practices, and beliefs are embedded and the linguistic resources with which they are actualized have gained prominence as research focal points in applied linguistics (Harvey and Koteyko 2012). These concerns have become especially relevant in the context of health disparities that affect minority-language populations throughout the world. The issue of language barriers in health care has thus opened up new opportunities for applied linguists to provide unique insights and engage in a larger dialogue about the unequal treatment of language minorities in healthcare delivery systems.
