An Overview of Medical Discourse Studies: Cultural Variation across Genres and Registers Darly Ofica Universitas Lancang Kuning, Indonesia Abstract Discourse is a language context that exists in a dialogue or communication interaction Discourse is also part of pragmatic analysis Discourse takes a role in medical side broadly It exits in medical context about curing, healing, therapy, curative practices, speaking and writing that can help medical institution, social action, and etc this paper reviews a description about cultural variation in medical discourse and variation between register and genres This study examines two approaches to analyzing Medical Discourse namely Conversation Analysis (CA) Foucaults’ theory Keywords :Medical Discourse, Cultural Variation, Genres, Registers Introduction This paper generally tries to explain the anthropological meaning of medical discourse In learning discourse and medicine at the same time take us to come upon culture circumlocutory established As historically placed practices, medical discourse forms have a role in culture production and also reproduction Effectual intervention in those processes intelligent assessment of communication practices in contexts of socio cultural Definition of Discourse The term “discourse” is a complex and mammoth-like interpretation Many previous studies mention the term discourse as very ambiguous since its introduction to modern science and the various broad interpretations of discourse Therefore, the definition of discourse reflected here will focus on the linguistics point of view, especially that of applied linguistics Here, it refers to the speech patterns and how language, dialects, and acceptable statements are used in a particular community Discourse as a subject of study looks at discourse among people who share the same speech conventions Moreover, discourse refers to the linguistics of language use as a way of understanding interactions in a social context, specifically the analysis of occurring connected speech or written discourse, Dakowska (2001) in Hamuddin (2012) As a macro level in society, discourse impinges on patients and doctor as part of social context in medical field Meanwhile as micro level, discourse influences for doctor-patients interaction, in communication about illness, healing or medical treatment Gesture and Embodied Communicative Action in Medical Interaction Gesture, posture, and speech equally result meaning in interaction of medical Patients’ position can make body parts are able to see by doctor This paper investigates such as context and practice Medical discourse spirited two streams of work starting in 1960s, they are macro-analytic and micro-analytic Actually, the analysis of medical discourse concept has been employed, for example on training and also certifying doctor candidates It is unfortunate that, on medical discourse much of the literature delimits itself in biomedical settings to practitioner-patient interaction and adjusts proposals for upgrading communication to biomedical models of the patient-doctor gathering, such as a “biopsychosocial” or “patientcentered” approach Among practitioners, communication influences health seekers’ experiences This strict statement is supported by many sorts analyses of discursive events implicating practitioners intercommunicating with each other : grand rounds (Atkinson 1999, Martin 1992), medical school lectures (Linthorst et al 2007, Martin 1992), team meetings of occupational therapists (Mattingly 1998b, and clinical settings where an attending physician consults specialists (Cicourel 1992) Medical Discourse as Anthropological Concern In this part, this paper is going to explain language’s model that best fit out reader to learn ethnographically medical discourse This paper locates the medical discourse on that model and an overview but in anthropological concern Limiting the connection between discourse and medicine largely creates anthropological sense Even though some of view of the connection may be only mentioned Discussing about medical discourse especially need general-understanding, that can help us to avoid the importance of medical Discussing about illness, perhaps point to nonmedical theme like speaker traits (other than sickness), family resources, relationship, and the moral context Attention to all signs patterns in discursive events also helps free us from the hold of referentialist language ideologies Discourse regarded as healing may never refer to sickness or healing or to those present Javanese wayang (shadow puppet plays), for example, refer to events in old royal courts Curative efficacy here depends on the iconicity between two acts in Coyote’s time and two steps—performance and healing—in ritual time The same stories can be used to cause as well as cure sickness, just as in Bangladesh Qur’anic verses may be inserted into amulets to heal or, if written or read backward, to curse Here again, sign patterning is crucial to event meaning Cultural Variation and Globalization Both commonalities and variation in medical discourse interest anthropologists Studies of symbolic healing have offered putative universals (Dow 1986) or have located shamanic chants somewhere between “our physical medicine and psychological therapies” We ought, however, add a layer of reflexivity to such comparisons, asking why they appeal to Navajos among others Thus our interest in the rich global diversity of discursive and interactional structures present in healing encounters, classifying discourses, reflections on healing signs, and illness talk invites analysis in and of itself, but the interest endures Consider the rule among Aboriginal occupants of Darwin fringe camps banning talk about one’s past serious illnesses (Sansom 1982) Such stories belong instead to those whose interventions saved one’s life Sansom in Wilce (2009) studied this after asking a man about his racking cough and being told that someone coming soon could explain it, no one could The stakes of medical discourse go beyond meaning and the reproduction of cultural sensibilities and encompass social transformation/reproduction Genre & Register Genre is types of discourse linked to even types, patterned to fit recipients’ expectations of both the discourse and the broader event And the register is various local speech repertoires Interactional Textuality and Healing (Treatment) In cultural context, forms of interactional textuality such as the achievement of coordination in turn taking, or alignment toward a shared sense of the activity at hand, can take on affective meanings such as intimacy Senegalese patients ground the efficacy of encounters with se´rin˜s (vernacular healers, marabouts) in that intimacy, coupled with hierarchy Textuality Translated or not, discourse is variably coherent, memorable, quotable, and thus “textual.” From any case of speech in interaction two kinds of “textuality,” or structures of coherence, can emerge: interactional textuality, i.e., the social acts, shift performed in talk (including outcomes like being insulted); and denotational textuality (Silverstein 2004), the quotable “said”-ness of discourse and patternment form involving denotative meanings To elaborate denotational patternment typifies ritual communication (Silverstein 2004), but even a conversation about one topic hangs together denotatively The entextualization of discourse enables its circulation Conclusion Medical Discourse studies have contributed to broader anthropological projects including the analysis of ideologies that empower some communicators and stigmatize others as pre-modern (Briggs2005) Rooted in close analysis of dyadic clinical encounters and other discourse forms, recent studies trace interactions between globally circulating discourse forms and local traditions that have constituted medical relationships, broadly construed Textuality, it is denotational or interactional, enables discourse to circulate, but competing patterns meet on a non-level playing field Further studies focusing on encounters of textuality different forms, a sin Senegal, are called for, as are others investigating how generalizable is the paradoxical affinity of scientific and ritual discourse apparent in the elaborate entextualization of some Bangladeshi psychiatrists’ discourse Finally, given that some studies consistently uncover patient practitioner collaboration and a degree of agency on the part of patients, whereas so there is finding somewhat similar settings a straight forward reproduction of power relations, both empirical and theoretical work to illuminate this contra dictionary needed Such studies stand to contribute to critical medical anthropology and to help those seeking not only to describe but changing medical fields Bibliography Wilce, James M (2009) Medical Discourse Department of Anthropology, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona Hammudin, Budianto (2012) A comparative study of politeness strategies in economic journals (Doctoral dissertation, University of Malaya)