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
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
Biomediatization: Health/Communicative Inequities and Health News
-
Published:May 2016
2016. "Biomediatization: Health/Communicative Inequities and Health News", Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice, Charles L. Briggs, Clara Mantini-Briggs
Download citation file:
This chapter challenges received dichotomies between medicine and the media, examining how epidemics and other medical objects are coproduced by media and medical professionals in dispersed sites through a process of biomediatization. It traces complicated relationships between epidemiology and journalism, in which epidemiological investigation can be designed to occasion or silence particular types of stories and journalism can prompt epidemiological inquiry. A prominent feature of the 1992–1993 cholera epidemic in Delta Amacuro was news coverage in which public health officials attributed some 500 deaths to an “indigenous culture” whose focus on spirits rather than microbes supposedly precluded participation in biomedicine. When the 2007–2008 rabies epidemic began, Conrado and Enrique Moraleda decided to confront this narrative by producing knowledge that they themselves could take to the national and international press. They accordingly challenged the way both Venezuelan socialist and opposition journalists exclude laypersons as producers of health knowledge.
Advertisement
