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
Toward Health/Communicative Equities and Justice
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Published:May 2016
This chapter extends the book's key argument regarding the relationship between health inequities and health/communicative inequities. Like the "carceral apparatus" (Loïc Wacquant) that dominates the lives of U.S. working-class African Americans, officials' responses to the 1992–1993 cholera epidemic created an epidemiological apparatus that structured and policed the pervasive indigenous/nonindigenous divide in Delta Amacuro. The Bolivarian Revolution sparked effective national efforts to ameliorate health inequities, but health/communicative inequities largely remained unaddressed. Scholarly frameworks in Latin American social medicine, critical epidemiology, social epidemiology, and critical medical anthropology theorize health inequities but similarly leave out—and can sometimes extend—health/communicative inequities. The argument builds on Veena Das's work on narrative and the ordinary and Mohan Dutta's critical culture-based perspective on health communication in stressing the importance of analyzing the coproduction of health and health/communicative inequities at various sites, including clinics, vernacular healing, epidemiology, health news, and public health policy.
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