I am interested in philosophical and ethnographic issues regarding how bodies, media, viruses and bacteria, narratives and songs, and race constantly get mixed up, sometimes fatally. I have engaged these issues by investigating epidemics of cholera and rabies in Venezuela, collaborating with patients, parents, doctors, nurses, healers, and epidemiologists to figure out why so many people die from preventable diseases. My concern with infectiousness spreads from microbes to narratives, to thinking about how stories about cholera, rabies, H1N1, Ebola, diabetes, and COVID-19 are produced and ways that their social lives shape the imaginations of policymakers, clinicians, journalists, and publics.
Much of my recent work has centered on communicability, constructions of the circulation of pathogens and representations of them. I have focused on how clinical and public health professionals view communicability as the production of knowledge in laboratories, clinics, and epidemiologists’ offices, its circulation through clinical encounters, health media, health communication, and social media, and its reception by lay publics invested with a governmental obligation to assimilate this “information” and transform it into corporeal changes.
The COVID-19 pandemic constitutes probably the most extensive example in which viruses move in complex relationship with scientific and medical findings, journalism, public health guidelines, forms classified as “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” and online networks in which patients collaboratively contribute to understanding a virus that is hard to contain, discursively or epidemiologically.
I am now deeply engaged in a large study of the effects of the pandemic on peoples’ lives, work, and fundamental conceptions. I have interviewed physicians, psychiatrists, nurses, dentists, public health officials, journalists, community-based organizations, elected officials, judges, educators, religious professionals, firefighter/paramedics, police officers, and a wide range of nonprofessionals, largely in California, New Mexico, and Montana. Two chapters of a new book,
Incommunicable, engage this research, and I am currently writing a public-facing book that focuses on the spectacular failure of COVID-19 health communication and the social divides that have emerged in its wake.
Exploring conceptual quagmires surrounding issues of language, poetics, and performance led me to collaborate with Richard Bauman in rereading work in philosophy, linguistics, history, politics, anthropology, folklore, science, and other fields from the 17th-20th centuries. We discovered that models of language and tradition often provide the unannounced foundations on which new political epistemologies are launched and social arrangements naturalized. Our Voices of Modernity (2003) won the Edward Sapir Book Prize.
A cholera epidemic killed 500 people in Delta Amacuro, Venezuela in 1992-1993. Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, and I researched global medical profiling, following ways that germs get linked to constructions of racialized bodies. Our Stories in the Time of Cholera received the Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association and the J.I. Staley Prize from the School for Advanced Research. A Spanish expanded edition, Las historias en los tiempos del cólera, is now available open source (http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b23213458(link is external)).
When Mantini-Briggs and I returned Delta Amacuro in 2008 to bring income from royalties and awards to rainforest residents, we encountered a mysterious epidemic that had killed thirty-eight children and young adults. Leaders Conrado and Enrique Moraleda asked us, healer Tirso Gomez, and nurse Norbelys Gomez to join them in creating a novel knowledge-production process that included the parents' personal narratives, vernacular healing, laments, clinical medicine, and epidemiology. Two book projects have emerged from it. Published in Argentina in 2015, Una efermedad monstruo: Indígenas derribando el cerco de la discriminación en salud (A Monster Disease: Indigenous Peoples Breaking Down the Wall of Health-Based Discrimination) emerged from 60 hours of conversations. Experimentally presented as a dialogue between team members, the book mirrors the dialogic process that resulted in a clinical diagnosis—rabies transmitted by vampire bats—and the broader goal of demonstrating how indigenous peoples can generate innovative perspectives on global health problems.
The second is Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge and Communicative Justice, co-authored by Clara Mantini-Briggs. Part I juxtaposes narratives told by grieving parents, doctors, nurses, healers, epidemiologists, and journalists. Each chapter of Part II offers a new conceptual framework for rethinking issues of narrative and health, bodies and knowledge production, the work of mourning, and the mediatization of health. The book explores how rights to produce and circulate knowledge about health are co-produced with unfair distributions of care and disease, tying health inequities to health/communicative inequities.
Reflections on how Venezuelan journalists reported cholera in 1991-1992 gave rise to collaboration with media/journalism scholar Daniel C. Hallin and building a Latin American network that includes Eduardo Menéndez in Mexico and Hugo Spinelli and Anahi Sy in Argentina. In Making Health Public, Hallin and I focus on biomediatization processes through which health and media professionals co-produce basic understandings of health and disease. Using content analysis and ethnography conducted in clinics, public health offices, living rooms, and a wide range of media venues, we focus particularly on H1N1 ("swine flu"), Ebola, pharmaceutical and biotech corporations, and how race and health are co-produced in health news. We are currently planning a new edition that brings the book’s insights to bear on COVID-19.
A 2021 book entitled Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge brings together the analytic foundations of my recent work on the politics of knowledge, coloniality, disciplinary boundary-work (particularly that separating anthropology and folkloristics, linguistic and medical anthropology), pandemics, and mediatization. Its title reflects recognition of ways that I have come to focus less on a possessive accumulation of knowledge than, thanks in part to provocations emerging in decolonial collaborative teaching projects, to ways that an unlearning curve is expanding my ability to question the foundations of what I considered to be knowledge. The book includes a psychoanalytic and decolonial rethinking of work conducted with Richard Bauman on poetics and performance.
Incommunicability: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine(link is external) will be released by Duke University Press in March 2024. (The Introduction is available here)(link is external). It takes a decolonial approach to analyzing how notions of language and communication and of medicine and health are tied to White supremacy, colonialism, and the production of racial hierarchies. Proceeding philosophically, analytically, and ethnographically, it provides a new analytic framework for rethinking two sites in which attention to communication and health converges, doctor-patient interaction and health communication in global health. Drawing on Black feminist and other anti- racist approaches, it details ways that received theory and practice in these areas thwarts communication and increases what I refer to as health/communicative equities by stigmatizing subjects as incommunicable—as incapable of participating in dominant communicable practices. Chapters on knowledge production and care in the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States provide insights into why such things as masks and vaccines became flash points and how issues of care often divided health professionals and laypersons, even as they both faced enormous challenges.
I am the Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, with Seth Holmes; BCSM (link is external)brings together scholars across UC Berkeley departments and schools, Bay Area universities and communities, and around the world who are developing critica perspectives on questions related to medicine, the health sciences, public health, global health, violence, and health inequities. I also serve, with Clara Mantini-Briggs, MD MPH, as the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of the Health of Latinx Communities.(link is external) Under the auspices of the UC Berkeley Latinx Research Center, we are working with Berkeley students to document the contributions of Latinx-centered social movements, particularly in California, in fighting for health justice.
