Charles L. Briggs

Voices of modernity : language ideologies and the politics of inequality

1. Introduction 2. Making language safe for science and society: from Francis Bacon to John Lock 3. Antiquaries and philologists: the construction of modernity and its others in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England 4. The critical foundations of national epic: Hugh Blair, the Ossian controversy, and the rhetoric of authenticity 5. Johann Gottfried Herder: language reform, das Volk, and the patriarchal state in eighteenth-century Germany 6. The Brothers Grimm: scientizing, textual production in the service of romantic nationalism 7. Henry Rowe school craft and the making of an American textual tradition 8. The foundation of all future researches: Franz Boas, George Hunt, Native American texts and the construction of modernity 9. Conclusion.

Anthropology, Interviewing, and Communicability in Contemporary Society

Developing an anthropology of interviewing could provide a rich focus for ethnographies of the contemporary and illuminate how anthropologists’ modes of knowledge production intersect with practices that play crucial roles in the media, corporations, electoral politics, state bureaucracies, and a wide range of professions. Interviewing is informed by ideological constructions of discourse production, circulation, and reception, communicable cartographies that are widely shared by anthropologists and nonanthropologists. The capacity of interview‐based texts to project maps of their purported sources, processes of encoding, modes of circulation, recipients, and legitimate modes of reception naturalizes interviewing, simultaneously imbuing interviews with power and shielding them from critical scrutiny. Analyses of David Stoll’s attack on the veracity of I, Rigoberta Menchú, Américo Paredes’s critique of ethnographic work on Mexican‐Americans, and the author’s interviews with Venezuelan women convicted of infanticide illustrate this process. An anthropology of interviewing has potential for illuminating such issues as the spatialization and temporalization of ethnography, the doubling of ethnography “in the field” and at “the desk,” questions of scale, the science wars in anthropology, and the ways in which anthropologists mirror and are mirrored by other “expert” knowledge makers.

Biocommunicability and the Biopolitics of Pandemic Threats

In this article we assess accounts of the H1N1 virus or “swine flu” to draw attention to the ways in which discourse about biosecurity and global health citizenship during times of pandemic alarms supports calls for the creation of global surveillance systems and naturalizes forms of governance. We propose a medical anthropology of epidemics to complement an engaged anthropology aimed at better and more critical forms of epidemic surveillance. A medical anthropology of epidemics provides insights into factors and actors that shape the ongoing production of knowledge about epidemics, how dominant and competing accounts circulate and interact, how different stakeholders (citizens, politicians, journalists, and policymakers) access and interpret information available from different sources—including through a variety of new digital venues—and what they do with it. These insights together provide a compelling agenda for medical anthropology and anyone working in health-related fields.

Health reporting as political reporting: Biocommunicability and the public sphere

This article discusses contrasting forms of ‘biocommunicability’ as manifested in health-care reporting. The concept of ‘biocommunicability’ refers to sets of normative assumptions on the production and circulation of knowledge and information about health. This article builds on a previous paper discussing two models of ‘biocommunicability’ that dominate health reporting — the medical authority and patient— consumer models — introducing a third, public sphere model, and discussing the kinds of hybrid genres of reporting that have emerged as health issues have been drawn into the political arena. The article is based on content and discourse analysis of seven months of health reporting in a regional newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, as well as examples drawn from reporting in the national press, and on interviews with reporters and health professionals.

Transcending the medical/media opposition in research on news coverage of health and medicine

Health and medicine are major topics of news coverage, but research on health and medical reporting has remained mainly confined to specialist subfields, with less impact on broader academic fields, including journalism studies, than would seem warranted by its importance. This article argues that assumptions implicit in much of this literature have limited the development of a wider tradition of research on health journalism. We point particularly to what we call the linear-reflectionist perspective, which sees health journalism as an often-flawed mechanism for transmitting pre-existing medical knowledge to the mass public. We propose an alternative framework that seeks to illuminate the complexity and importance of this field of study.

Stories In The Time Of Cholera Race And Public Health In Venezuela

n 1992 and 1993 some five hundred people died in the maze of rivers and thousands of large and small islands that form the delta region of the Orinoco River in eastern Venezuela. The disease that killed so many so quickly was cholera. One of us, Charles, stumbled onto the epidemic in November 1992 during a two-week visit to Tucupita, a city of some 40 thousand inhabitants and the capital of Delta Amacuro state. Clara was working for the regional office of the Ministry of Health and Public Assistance, and she helped to coordinate efforts to prevent the spread of the epidemic. Many friends from the delta were living on the streets of Tucupita and nearby Barrancas del Orinoco, another small city on the edge of the delta, begging and performing odd jobs to survive, sleeping in shelters con-

The Coloniality of Folklore: Towards a Multi-Genealogical Practice of Folkloristics

This article challenges genealogies that trace the origins of folkloristics to the discovery of shared cultural forms emerging within European populations, thereby relegating colonialism to the status of temporary detours that did not seriously shape the discipline. We reread folklore study in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, pointing to ways that concepts, texts and methods were shaped by colonialism from the start. Using four cases from the twentieth century, we suggest that the legacy of colonialism—which we refer to as the coloniality of folkloristics—continues to exert intellectually and institutionally problematic effects on the discipline. We propose a multi-genealogical practice of folkloristics as a means of opening up the assumptions that inform and often limit existing concepts and approaches, forging tools more suited to the study of contemporary cultural forms and imagining more robust futures for folkloristics.

Discourse, Anthropology of

Although the concept of discourse has played a significant role in anthropological research since the 1980s, competing framings as an analytic concept or object of research have sometimes given rise to nonoverlapping, or even acrimonious conversations. Beginning in the 1990s, interest in ideologies of language, practice theory, and issues of scale prompted increasingly productive exchanges across subdisciplines and perspectives. Recent respositionings of discourse both as analytical concept and a focus of research on shifts of capital, culture, and language in contemporary landscapes sparked a proliferation of research on discourse and its frequent assimilation as a mundane component of research frameworks.

Indexical Disorders and Ritual (De)Centers of Semiosis

Focusing on Michael Silverstein’s account of relationships between “microcontexts of interaction” and the “macrosociological,” this article takes up his suggestion that news reporting provides particularly clear examples of such links. Examining a mundane ABC World News report on changing recommendations for vitamin intake, it analyzes how leading physician-journalist Richard Besser constructs a ritual center of medical semiosis, projects it as inaccessible to laypersons, and models a circulatory process that requires highly constrained forms of communication. Ethnography in newsrooms, clinical spaces, public health offices, and elsewhere suggests how notions of (1) a ritual center that produces medical knowledge, (2) a primordial space of doctor-patient interaction that affords limited, highly regulated access to laypersons, and (3) what are construed as processes of communication require the continual making of communicable models that attempt to separate projected first and second indexical orders and, just as importantly, generate indexical disorders that create anxiety and seem to require assistance from physician-journalist guides.

Towards Communicative Justice in Health

ABSTRACT This article approaches care from a different angle by looking ethnographically at how it is shaped by structural differences in the power to control the circulation of knowledge. I focus on an investigation conducted by people classified as “indigenous”, of an epidemic that killed 38 children and young adults in a Venezuelan rainforest. I trace how health/communicative inequities structured clinical interactions, documents, epidemiological investigations, news stories, and dialogues with healers, thwarting the identification of the epidemic, clinically identified as rabies. Although the Bolivarian socialist government provided access to care, professionals denigrated parents’ contributions to care and communication and reduced complex, unequal relations between languages to practical problems of translation. Pointing to parallels with US social movements, I suggest that responding to demands for communicative justice in health requires seeing how health inequities are entangled with health/communicative inequities. The typographical slash points to importance of challenging the subdisciplinary boundary-work that relegates their study to non-overlapping conversations in medical and linguistic anthropology.