Table of Contents

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

About the Author

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. 

Reviews

"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.'”
*Health Affairs*

“There are no easy explanations in this book, but it serves a valuable role by reminding us that lofty ideological claims and even passionate practical commitment are, in themselves, insufficient for eradicating deep structural inequalities, the real solutions to which can sometimes only be found among the people themselves.”
*Latin American Review of Books*

"It is in this combination of ambitious scope and gut-wrenching intimacy that Tell Me Why My Children Died really shines. This book is a model not just for anthropologists interested in epidemics (Ebola and Zika were frequently on my mind while I was reading, and they are occasionally invoked in the text), but, just as importantly, for readers interested in a first-hand account of the messy, frustrating and ambivalent work of communicating calls for justice."
*Journal of Latin American Studies*

"This ethnography will undoubtedly be embraced by scholars and graduate students in the fields of medical and linguistic anthropology, Latin American Studies and Indigenous Studies. Nevertheless, in my opinion, a book like this is most needed to encourage critical approaches to communication, global health and public health disciplines, as well as engaging lower level students in sophisticated discussions around contemporary American societies."
*Bulletin of Latin American Research*

"The book will be useful and provocative for researchers, students, and faculties in the social sciences, medicine, and science and technology studies. I strongly recommend it."
*Ethnohistory*