In 1976, the cultural critic Raymond Williams published a volume titled “Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society.”
After Williams returned from World War II, says Sari Altschuler, associate professor of English at Northeastern University, he made the observation that “people were using the word ‘culture,’ and it didn’t mean what it meant before.”
Williams’ intervention, his recognition that certain commonly used words are more fraught and complex than we often recognize — or might prefer them to be — is at the heart of Altschuler’s latest project, “Keywords for Health Humanities” (part of the NYU Press’s “Keywords” series).
Altschuler edited the volume alongside Jonathan M. Metzl of Vanderbilt University and Priscilla Wald of Duke University.
The textbook contains articles — each exploring an individual word related to the health humanities — written by over 70 leading scholars across disciplines in the humanities.
But these are neither dictionary definitions nor all-encompassing encyclopedia entries. Rather, Altschuler “would call them meditations on words and language as it changes, and has changed, historically,” she says, and “as it emerges in different, sometimes competing ways.”
