Tell me why my children died : rabies, indigenous knowledge, and communicative justice / Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Briggs, Charles L., 1953- author.

Mantini-Briggs, Clara, 1956- author.

Series:

Critical global health

Critical global health: evidence, efficacy, ethnography

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Warao children--Diseases--Venezuela--Delta Amacuro--History--21st century.

Warao children.

Epidemics--Venezuela--Delta Amacuro--History--21st century.

Epidemics.

Discrimination in medical care--Venezuela--Delta Amacuro--History--21st century.

Discrimination in medical care.

Communicable diseases in children--Venezuela--Delta Amacuro--History--21st century.

Communicable diseases in children.

History.

Venezuela--Delta Amacuro.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xxi, 319 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2016.

Summary:

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. Book jacket.

Contents:

Reliving the epidemic: parents' perspectives

When caregivers fail: doctors, nurses, and healers facing an intractable disease

Explaining the inexplicable in Mukoboina: epidemiologists, documents, and the dialogue that failed

Heroes, bureaucrats, and millenarian wisdom: journalists cover an epidemic conflict

Narratives, communicative monopolies, and acute health inequities

Knowledge production and circulation

Laments, psychoanalysis, and the work of mourning

Biomediatization: health/communicative inequities and health news

Toward health/communicative equities and justice.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 287-302) and index.

ISBN:

9780822361053

0822361051

9780822361244

0822361248

OCLC:

917359102