Charles L. Briggs
Abstract This article proposes alternative analytics for linguistic anthropology by exploring how the Lockean legacy of communicability and contemporary emphasis on indexical order simultaneously create incommunicabilities , stigmatizing people and cultural forms as communicable failures, and generating indexical disorder . It traces a regime of scientific communicability emerging during the COVID‐19 pandemic through the World Health Organization's attack on “mis‐ and dis‐information” and Anthony Fauci's televised COVID‐19 presentations. Their precarious claims to communicability cast laypersons as incommunicable, opening space for counterclaims of scientific communicability by conservative critics, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the Trump administration's attack on universities and scientific research.