DATE: June 13, 2019
TIME: 4:30pm
VENUE: Room 4.36, 4/F Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

When a mysterious epidemic in a Venezuelan rainforest killed 38 children and young adults, indigenous residents launched their own investigation. Recruiting anthropologist Charles L. Briggs and physician Clara Mantini-Briggs, they juxtaposed parents’ narratives, vernacular healing, epidemiology, and clinical medicine in generating a diagnosis—bat transmitted rabies—and forging a new model of global health. This talk focuses on ways that acute health inequalities were co-produced with communicative inequalities, meaning vastly unequal distributions of rights to participate in the production and circulation of knowledge about health and disease. Tracing how communicative health inequalities structured clinical interactions, epidemiological investigations, news stories, and dialogues with healers, thereby thwarting diagnosis of the epidemic for over a year, the paper suggests that achieving significant gains in global health is contingent on building a shared commitment to communicative justice in health.

Biographical sketch

Charles L. Briggs (PhD University of Chicago, 1981) is Professor of Anthropology, Co-Director of the Medical Anthropology Program, and Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology of the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches social/cultural, medical, and linguistic anthropology and folkloristics. His books include The Wood Carvers of Córdova, New Mexico; Learning How to Ask; Voices of Modernity (with Richard Bauman); Competence in performance; Stories in the Time of Cholera (with Clara Mantini-Briggs); Making Health Public (with Daniel Hallin); and Tell Me Why My Children Died (with Clara Mantini-Briggs). He has received such honors as the James Mooney Award, the Chicago Folklore Prize, the Edward Sapir Book Prize, the J. I. Staley Prize, the Américo Paredes Prize, the New Millennium Book Award, the Cultural Horizons Prize, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.

Related Exhibition:

Tell Me Why My Children Died: Searching for Justice in an Epidemic of Bat-Transmitted Rabies
Photographs by Charles L. Briggs
June 3 – 14, 2019
G/F Gallery, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU