Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice
Charles L. Briggs is Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, and the author or coauthor of ten books.
Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, was the National Coordinator of the Dengue Fever Program in Venezuela's Ministry of Health and is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. They are coauthors of Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare.
Charles L. Briggs is Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, and the author or coauthor of ten books.
Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, was the National Coordinator of the Dengue Fever Program in Venezuela's Ministry of Health and is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. They are coauthors of Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare.
Narratives, Communicative Monopolies, and Acute Health Inequities
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Published:May 2016
2016. "Narratives, Communicative Monopolies, and Acute Health Inequities", Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice, Charles L. Briggs, Clara Mantini-Briggs
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This chapter challenges common views of narrative as externalizing interior states or representing events by demonstrating how narratives are coproduced with acts of care. It uses Walter Benjamin’s work to suggest that the labor of care and of health/communicative labor are coproduced, creating complex layers of embeddedness as bodies and narratives circulate. Received medical modes of eliciting patient stories and transforming them into medical narratives thus erase or pathologize the webs of care and health/communicative labor that patients and relatives bring to the clinic. Analyzing how narratives both situate acts of care and communication and render them mobile, the discussion...
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