Sounds of Death, Images of Bio(In)Security --Colloquium with Dr. Charles Briggs

Abstract:
This paper returns, perhaps nostalgically, to a dialogue between scholars of music, language, aesthetics, and performance that emerged in the 1970s, flourished ephemerally in the 1980s, and withered as the new millennium approached. These reflections were sparked after I was recruited as the ethnographer and photographer for an extraordinary collaboration between indigenous activists, healers, and biomedical professionals seeking to diagnose and document an epidemic of a 100% fatal unknown disease in a Venezuelan rainforest. It traces the production and literally global circulation of sounds—the wailing and narratives of parents—and visual images, reflecting on how alternative sites of knowledge-making and mediatization were transformed into a criminal threat to state (bio)security.

I received my PhD from the University of Chicago in Anthropology in 1981. My research and teaching center on the development of critical perspectives that cross borders - national, disciplinary, epistemological, and the academic/activist divide. I have worked in the United States and Latin America, and I combine linguistic and medical anthropology with social/cultural anthropology and folkloristics. I have explored many topics, but I have focused on using a variety of critical approaches in exploring how precarious poetics and social constructions of language, communication, and media structure and are structured by everyday life in zones of racialization, power, danger, and often death.