Charles L. Briggs
Charles Leslie Briggs is an anthropologist who works at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. Before working at Berkeley he held a position as Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department and Director of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies at University of California, San Diego.
Biographical information
He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He got a BA in Anthropology, Psychology and Philosophy from Colorado College. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1981.Research interests
Charles L. Briggs is the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor at Berkeley. His initial research focus centered on the "Mexicano" population of his home state of New Mexico in the US, analyzing how folklore, oral history, and wood carving articulated resistance to racism and land expropriation. Focusing his attention on indigenous people in Venezuela, he then documented--in collaboration with Clara Mantini-Briggs MD MPH--how medical profiling increased the lethality and long-term consequences of outbreaks of cholera and bat-transmitted rabies. In addition to studying revolutionary health care in Venezuela, work in collaboration with Daniel C. Hallin documented biomediatization--how journalism, medical, and public health professionals collaborate in constructing health through news media. His recent work decolonizes understandings of health and medicine, language and communication by rethinking relations between linguistic and medical anthropology. He is currently researching the effect of the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing how racialized approaches to health communication intersected with lay participation in knowledge production and care in producing profound social divides.Publications
Representative publications include:1980. The Wood Carvers of Córdova, New Mexico: Social Dimensions of an Artistic "Revival."
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
1986. Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social
Science Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1988. Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
1990. The Lost Gold Mine of Juan Mondragón: A Legend of New Mexico Performed by
Melaquías Romero. Tucson: University of Arizona Press..
1990. Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life. Annual
Review of Anthropology 19:59-88.
1992. Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2:131-72.
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1996. Disorderly discourse: Narrative, conflict, and social inequality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2003. Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare. Berkeley:
University of California Press..
2003. Voices of modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
2016. Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge and Communicative Justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
2016. Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life. London: Routledge.
2021. Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge. Logan: Utah State University Press.