Charles L. Briggs

Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare

Stories in the Time of Cholera

Daniel C. Hallin

How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life

Making Health Public

Clara Mantini-Briggs

Tell Me Why My Children Died tells the gripping story of indigenous leaders' efforts to identify a strange disease that killed thirty-two children and six young adults in a Venezuelan rain forest between 2007 and 2008. In this pathbreaking book, Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs relay the nightmarish and difficult experiences of doctors, patients, parents, local leaders, healers, and epidemiologists; detail how journalists first created a smoke screen, then projected the epidemic worldwide; discuss the Chávez government's hesitant and sometimes ambivalent reactions; and narrate the eventual diagnosis of bat-transmitted rabies. The book provides a new framework for analyzing how the uneven distribution of rights to produce and circulate knowledge about health are wedded at the hip with health inequities. By recounting residents' quest to learn why their children died and documenting their creative approaches to democratizing health, the authors open up new ways to address some of global health's most intractable problems.

Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice

Tell Me Why My Children Died

Professor of Ethnic Studies Charles Briggs

This volume contains eight essays that are at the intersection of two important areas within linguistics: conversational analysis, and the use of narrative in the creation, mediation, and resolution of conflict. The contributors explore these issues in a variety of cultures and languages.

Narrative, Conflict, & Inequality

Disorderly Discourse

In Competence in Performance, Charles L. Briggs explores the nature of the gift of oral performance and the competence that underlies that ability. His study focuses on rural Hispanic communities in northern New Mexico. There, individuals, particularly older people, are highly respected for their ability to use language both beautifully and persuasively, prompting their listeners to look beyond appearances to grasp the deeper meaning of the performance. Briggs elucidates the contributions of each genre--proverbs, scriptural allusions, jokes, legends, treasure tales, hymns and prayers--to the Mexicans' struggle to survive as a community, showing how the meaning of a given performance arises from a creative interaction between the worlds of reality and imagination. The author argues that the differing ways in which each performance, performer, and genre relate text and context underlie the power and creativity of verbal art and he suggests that analyzing this process will provide crucial insights into the nature of communicative competence in general. Competence in Performance will be of interest to scholars and students of folklore, anthropology, linguistics, and oral history, was well as ethnomethodology and literary criticism.

The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art

Competence in Performance

Richard Bauman

Distinguished Professor of Folklore and Anthropology Richard Bauman

Charles S. Briggs

Language and tradition have long been relegated to the sidelines as scholars have considered the role of politics, science, technology and economics in the making of the modern world. This reading of over two centuries of philosophy, political theory, anthropology, folklore and history argues that new ways of imagining language and representing supposedly premodern people - the poor, labourers, country folk, non-europeans and women - made political and scientific revolutions possible. The connections between language ideologies, privileged linguistic codes, and political concepts and practices shape the diverse ways we perceive ourselves and others. This 2003 book demonstrates that contemporary efforts to make schemes of social inequality based on race, gender, class and nationality seem compelling and legitimate, rely on deeply-rooted ideas about language and tradition. Showing how critics of modernity unwittingly reproduce these foundational fictions, it suggests strategies for challenging the undemocratic influence of these voices of modernity.

Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality

Voices of Modernity

Interviews are ubiquitous in modern society, and they play a crucial role in social scientific research. But, as Charles Briggs convincingly argues in this book, received interviewing techniques rest on fundamental misapprehensions about the nature both of the interview as a communicative event, and of the nature of the data that it produces. Furthermore, interviewers rarely examine the compatibility of interviews as a means of acquiring information to one another. These oversights often blind interviewers to ensuing errors of interpretation, as well as to the limitations of the interview as a means of acquiring data. To conflict these problems, Professor Briggs presents an analysis of the 'communicative blunders' that he himself committed in conducting research interviews among Spanish-speakers in northern New Mexico. By focusing on these errors and exploring how they may be avoided, he is able to propose new techniques for designing, implementing, and analyzing interview-based research. These rest on identifying the subjects' resources for conveying information, and the relative compatibility of the shared rules and understandings that underlie their strategies with those associated with interviews. Critical of existing paradigms of interviewing, which he sees as deriving from Western 'folk' theories of reality and communication, Briggs shows that the development of more sophisticated interviewing methodologies requires further research into interviewing itself. Briggs's conclusions provide a basis for the reexamination of current uses of interviews in a wide range of contexts - from social science research to job applications, welfare and health care delivery, criminal and legal investigations, journalism and broadcasting, and other areas of everyday life. His book will appeal to linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, psychologists, as well as other readers whose research or professional activities depend on the use of interviews.

A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research

Learning How to Ask

Cholera, although it can kill an adult through dehydration in half a day, is easily treated. Yet in 1992-93, some five hundred people died from cholera in the Orinoco Delta of eastern Venezuela. In some communities, a third of the adults died in a single night, as anthropologist Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, reveal in their frontline report. Why, they ask in this moving and thought-provoking account, did so many die near the end of the twentieth century from a bacterial infection associated with the premodern past? It was evident that the number of deaths resulted not only from inadequacies in medical services but also from the failure of public health officials to inform residents that cholera was likely to arrive. Less evident were the ways that scientists, officials, and politicians connected representations of infectious diseases with images of social inequality. In Venezuela, cholera was racialized as officials used anthropological notions of "culture" in deflecting blame away from their institutions and onto the victims themselves. The disease, the space of the Orinoco Delta, and the "indigenous ethnic group" who suffered cholera all came to seem somehow synonymous. One of the major threats to people's health worldwide is this deadly cycle of passing the blame. Carefully documenting how stigma, stories, and statistics circulate across borders, this first-rate ethnography demonstrates that the process undermines all the efforts of physicians and public health officials and at the same time contributes catastrophically to epidemics not only of cholera but also of tuberculosis, malaria, AIDS, and other killers. The authors have harnessed their own outrage over what took place during the epidemic and its aftermath in order to make clear the political and human stakes involved in the circulation of narratives, resources, and germs.

This volume contains eight essays that are at the intersection of two important areas within linguistics: conversational analysis, and the use of narrative in the creation, mediation and resolution of conflict. The contributors e×plore these issues in a variety of cultures and languages.

Charles L. Briggs

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