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.
The story concludes with the government's rejection of the preliminary diagnosis of rabies and its failure to provide an alternative: the parents' demand, "Tell me why my children died," was never met. Indigenous knowledge was not simply embodied in a decontextualized phrase, like buenvivir, but revealed health inequities and challenged the fatal effects of health/communicative inequities, providing a model for decolonizing health and health communication. The multiple ways health/communicative inequities structure health systems produce nonknowledge as systematically as they provide evidence-based knowledge, thereby thwarting the circulation of critical insights. The parents' and local leaders' response to the epidemic...
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