Tell Me Why My Children Died tells the gripping story of indigenous leaders' efforts to identify a strange disease that killed thirty-two children and six young adults in a Venezuelan rain forest between 2007 and 2008. In this pathbreaking book, Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs relay the nightmarish and difficult experiences of doctors, patients, parents, local leaders, healers, and epidemiologists; detail how journalists first created a smoke screen, then projected the epidemic worldwide; discuss the Chávez government's hesitant and sometimes ambivalent reactions; and narrate the eventual diagnosis of bat-transmitted rabies. The book provides a new framework for analyzing how the uneven distribution of rights to produce and circulate knowledge about health are wedded at the hip with health inequities. By recounting residents' quest to learn why their children died and documenting their creative approaches to democratizing health, the authors open up new ways to address some of global health's most intractable problems.  
Les mer
This gripping book narrates the efforts to identify a strange disease that killed thirty-eight people in a Venezuelan rainforest between 2007 and 2008 and sketches out systematic health inequities regarding the rights to produce and circulate knowledge about health throughout indigenous communities. 
Les mer
Illustrations  ix Prologue  xiii Preface  xvii Introduction  1 Part I. 1. Reliving the Epidemic: Parents' Perspectives  29 2. When Caregivers Fail: Doctors, Nurses, and Healers Facing an Intractable Disease  76 3. Explaining the Inexplicable in Mukoboina: Epidemiologists, Documents, and the Dialogue That Failed  109 4. Heroes, Bureaucrats, and Millenarian Wisdom: Journalists Cover an Epidemic Conflict  127 Part II. 5. Narratives, Communicative Monopolies, and Acute Health Inequities  159 6. Knowledge Production and Circulation  179 7. Laments, Psychoanalysis, and the Work of Mourning  205 8. Biomediatization: Health/Communicative Inequities and Health News  225 9. Toward Health/Communicative Equities and Justice  245 Conclusion  260 Acknowledgments  275 Notes  279 References  287 Index  303
Les mer
"Briggs and Mantini-Briggs do more than shed light on a tragedy—they give voice to the grieving parents and offer examples of innovative ways to combat health disparities around the world, such as examining the 'relational division of the labor of producing and circulating health knowledge.'”
Les mer
"A shocking testimony of a reality that challenges us. Again Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs give us irrefutable evidence of the greatest contradiction of the market society: the opulence of a few and misery for the many. Their account of the distressing but institutionally invisible reproduction of an avoidable epidemic confirms the revealing power of critical ethnography and places on the table of public health the role that communication plays in the social determination of health." 
Les mer

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780822361053
Publisert
2016-05-23
Utgiver
Vendor
Duke University Press
Vekt
612 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet

Biographical note

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