Incommunicable

Charles L. Briggs is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is coauthor of Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice, also published by Duke University Press.

“In Incommunicable, Charles L. Briggs provokes readers to consider a deeper understanding of the political, cultural, and economic structurings over the long term of medicine, biomedical science, and global health as well as how these structurings set the grounds for their deconstruction and failure. Language and suffering, meaning and treatment, channel power to reshape health and disease and biomedical science so as to reproduce inequality. Briggs powerfully shows how this works. A book of real importance!” - Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University "Kudos to Charles L. Briggs for his compelling account of health officials’ failure to communicate with the public. From COVID-19 to cholera outbreaks, critical medical information is ‘incommunicable’ to laypeople and communities with mounting health problems. The book is a heartbreaker, as clinicians fail again and again to listen to patients’ perspectives, and the ‘ruptures of understanding’ illness and death widen.” - Elinor Ochs, Distinguished Research Professor, University of California, Los Angeles

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction  1Part I: Philosophical Dialogues in Search of Incommunicability1. The Incommunicable Menance Lurking within Locke’s Charter for Communicability  292. W. E. B. Du Bois: Incommunicability and/as the Veil  413. Frantz Fanon: Doctors, Tarzan, and the Colonial Inscription of Incommunicability  534. Georges Canguilhem and the Clinical Production of Incommunicability  71Part II: How Incommunicability Shapes Entanglements of Language and Medicine5. Biocommunicable Labor and the Production of Incommunicability in “Doctor-Patient Interaction”  816. Health Communication: How In/communicabilities Jump Scale  109Interlude: Social Movements and Incommunicability-Free Zones  149Part III: Communicable Contours of the COVID-19 Pandemic7. Pandemic Ecologies of Knowledge: In Defense of COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories, Sort of  1618. Pandemic Ecologies of Care  197Conclusion  265Notes  275References  283Index  307