Shannon Gu

ANTH 215, Section AK

11/17/17
ANTH 215 Paper 2
Translational competency is the ability to facilitate communication between different
disciplines and systems of meaning and understand how meaning transforms as it is passed along
from group to group. It operates under the assumption that meanings can change across time and
place, which is crucial in bridging the gap between conflicting systems of meaning, as
demonstrated in Yates-Doerr’s (2014) article about obesity and public health interventions in
Guatemala. In Guatemala, people normally associate extra body fat with being healthier and
prosperous, a far cry from biomedical notions of fatness as unhealthy and damaging. The
medicalization of fatness as obesity and has led to clashes with cultural notions of health, making
scientific knowledge difficult to translate into public health practices. Thus, improving
translational competency is critical in reconciling the realms of science, culture, and society,
allowing more comprehensive and nuanced public health interventions to develop.
Science is its own culture, with its own language and set of understandings; therefore, what
is important in science may not matter at all to other cultures. Thus, trying to translate scientific
meaning into local languages is a complicated task. For example, the scientific field of nutrition
sorts foods into distinct categories, like fruits, meats, and so on. To Guatemalans who speak the
nation’s indigenous languages, however, “there are no words for fruits and vegetables since these
are not locally meaningful categories…the public health categories fruit, vegetable and starch do
not make very much sense” (Yates-Doerr, 2014, p. 9). Language and culture definitively shape the
creation of meaning, and there is no single answer to what counts as “meaningful” and what does
not. Thus, while food groups may mean something significant to the scientific community, they
have little to no meaning to the local communities in Guatemala. Translational competency would
attempt to incorporate local communities’ understandings into scientific understandings as well as
future interventions, which would make the interventions more accessible. Doing so, however, is
complex due to vastly different methods of expressing meaning in the first place.
Meaning-making is not solely limited to language and culture; social structures play a
major role in determining meaning as well. Social structures and resources, while they may be
longstanding, fluctuate and are never absolute. Naturally, then, meaning must be subject to the
same forces of change that affect social structures. An example is Guatemalan women’s choices
for their children’s diet, in which they feed their children processed foods over “healthier” foods:
Women who give their children Pepsi because boiled water is expensive and tap water
might cause diarrhea do not do so out of ignorance. In a region where stomach cancer
among children abounds, eating chips instead of vegetables washed in pesticide run-off
may not be a decision made from poor education, but a difficult trade-off of one kind of
sickness for another. (Yates-Doerr, 2014, p. 13).
Under normal circumstances, clean water and vegetables would have been the obvious healthy
options for food. Like Yates-Doerr states, however, the women chose a trade-off due to their
situation, picking the lesser of two evils. It was not that they were unaware of the consequences of
choosing processed foods; rather, they did not consider obesity to be a more serious problem than
that of diarrhea or stomach cancer, which their children could contract through eating
contaminated foods. Thus, public health interventions targeting obesity are less successful because
they put obesity at the forefront, which does not align with local notions of diseases and risks.
While scientific knowledge may state that obesity is harmful, it does not consider the social and
structural aspect of the rise in obesity. Through better translational competency, then, a more
effective public health intervention would bring together science and society to target not only
individuals but also the structures they live in.
The situation regarding obesity in Guatemala reveals a conflict between science, culture,
and society’s notions of bodily health, making public health interventions difficult to properly
implement. A solution to resolve that conflict is to apply translational competency, understanding
where different systems of meanings arise and how those meanings may change over time.
Although science dictates that obesity is bad for one’s health, it cannot impose its dominance on
cultural and societal ideas of health. For instance, Guatemalan indigenous languages defy scientific
classifications of foods, and societal structures and resources make obesity’s severity pale in
comparison to conditions such as stomach cancer. As Yates-Doerr (2014) notes, “The idea that
knowledge can ever be “understood” presumes a stable and correct version of the information
itself” (p. 13). While it is tempting to view scientific knowledge as the universal truth, social
perspectives quite often tell a different story, hence the purpose of translational competency: social
and scientific understandings must simultaneously guide each other to effectively improve public
health.
 Citations
Yates-Doerr, E. (2014). Obesity Science and Health Translations in Guatemala. Anthropology Now,
6(1), 3-14. doi:10.5816/anthropologynow.6.1.0003