Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice

Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography

by Charles L. Briggs, Clara Mantini-Briggs

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. 

 

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction

344 pages, Paperback

First published May 27, 2016

Reviews

[Lindsay · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was easily one of the best ethnographies I have ever read.

This was pretty much everything I want in an ethnography—interdisciplinary, grounded in its subjects experience, conscious of the inherit power imbalances involved—and with some truly beautiful writing to top to off. The concepts explore in this, most notably health/communicative inequities, are very intriguing and definitely should be addressed in more medical anthropology texts. I especially appreciated how the authors centered the parent’s and family member’s experiences from the beginning and emphasized that they were not passive victims but active participants in their own lives.

I will say that the authors seemed to lose steam towards the end, with the focus shifting to more theoretical discussions in a way that seemed less engaging than the person-focused first half. It isn’t the end of the world and is still engaging it its own right, but I could see some readers being turned off by that shift.

Overall, this is a really beautiful and heartbreaking ethnography that I think anyone interested in medical anthropology should read. Oh, and anthro instructors, maybe consider assigning this for a class!

[Jesse Field · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the choice of our pandemic reading group. The Warao people living in the Delta Amacuto region of Venezuela experienced a rabies epidemic in 2007, an event of greatest interest for its demonstration that this indigenous people had basically become the wards of the Venezuelan state, which failed to diagnose and treat the problem until almost a year later, when many dozens of rabies victims had died, most of them children.

Although I had trouble getting through the story at first, with its graphic descriptions of children deaths, I was convinced by the end of the book that this was very powerful work indeed. By sensitively embracing a wide range of social science approaches, authors Charles and Clara Briggs turns their own deeply intimate observations of the Warao people and their encounters with the Venezuelan metropole into a deep reflection on the structural inequalities among health-care stakeholders, from patients and doctors to researchers, policy makers, and journalists. By the time we reach chapter 6, we realize that this case of a localized epidemic can illustrate how social conflict and inequality can lead to journalists mischaracterizing illness and blaming its victims and earliest spreaders, to marginalized communities even further marginalized, and later suspicious of solutions proposed by health experts, and finally political leaders avoiding the truth because they want messy problems to be simpler and easier to solve, or at least cover up. The dogged efforts of Warao organizers, and some who helped, cried before the state, “Tell me why my children died!” And achieved a limited degree of listening from the larger Venezuelan government, though it may have seemed like too little, too late, to so many grieving parents. This is the path toward “communicative justice.”

Sounds familiar after all! It really opens one’s eyes to the need for social research to understand how COVID-19 leads to complex patterns of mistreatment, misdiagnosis, and unnecessary deaths all across the world. The upshot is likely the same in most places, however severe the circumstance: a more equitable, democratic health policy, respecting human beings and their bodily dignity in the terms of their own senses of humanity, and not the cold light of either politics or science, is crucial for providing the first response, palliative care, and further education that would reduce the suffering caused by COVID-19 around the world.

[Devin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a sad, true story and is a book about theory more than a narrative. Nevertheless, I was moved by the constant efforts of “the team” of researchers in the uncaring face of opposition.

You may need to do a little outside reading on the Bolivarian revolution led by Chavez.