Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge

by Charles L. Briggs

Overview

A provocative theoretical synthesis by renowned folklorist and anthropologist Charles L. Briggs, Unlearning questions intellectual foundations and charts new paths forward. Briggs argues, through an expansive look back at his own influential works as well as critical readings of the field, that scholars can disrupt existing social and discourse theories across disciplines when they collaborate with theorists whose insights are not constrained by the bounds of scholarship.

Eschewing narrow Eurocentric modes of explanation and research foci, Briggs brings together colonialism, health, media, and psychoanalysis to rethink classic work on poetics and performance that revolutionized linguistic anthropology, folkloristics, media studies, communication, and other fields. Beginning with a candid memoir that credits the mentors whose disconcerting insights prompted him to upend existing scholarly approaches, Briggs combines his childhood experiences in New Mexico with his work in graduate school, his ethnography in Venezuela working with Indigenous peoples, and his contemporary work-which is heavily weighted in medical folklore.

Unlearning offers students, emerging scholars, and veteran researchers alike a guide for turning ethnographic objects into provocations for transforming time-worn theories and objects of analysis into sources of scholarly creativity, deep personal engagement, and efforts to confront unconscionable racial inequities. It will be of significant interest to folklorists, anthropologists, and social theorists and will stimulate conversations across these disciplines.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646421015
Publisher:	Utah State University Press
Publication date:	05/03/2021
Edition description:	1
Pages:	346
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Charles L. Briggs is chair of the Folklore Graduate Program, codirector of the Medical Anthropology Program, codirector of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, and the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor of Folklore in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including Learning How to Ask, Stories in the Time of Cholera, Making Health Public, and Tell Me Why My Children Died. He has received such honors as the James Mooney Award, the Chicago Folklore Prize, the Edward Sapir Book Prize, the J. I. Staley Prize, the Américo Paredes Prize, the New Millennium Book Award, and the Cultural Horizons Prize, as well as prestigious fellowships.

Table of Contents

List of Figures ix

Introduction 3

Part I Unlearning Racialized Disciplinary Genealogies

1 Disciplining Folkloristics 53

2 Contested Mobilities: On the Politics and Ethnopoetics of Circulation 66

3 What We Should Have Learned from Américo Paredes: The Politics of Communicability and the Making of Folkloristics 78

4 The Coloniality of Folkloristics: Toward a Multi-Genealogical Practice Sadhana Naithani 100

Part II Rethinking Psychoanalysis, Poetics, and Performance

5 Reconnecting Psychoanalysis with Poetics and Performance 135

6 Dear Dr. Freud 161

Part III A New Poetics of Health, Multispecies Relations, and Environments

7 Toward a New Folkloristics of Health 193

8 Moving beyond "the Media": From Traditionalization to Mediatization 213

9 Germ Wordfare: The Poetic Production of Medical Panics 235

10 From Progressive Extractivism to Phyto-Socialism: Trees, Bodies, and Discrepant Phytocommunicabilities in a Mysterious Epidemic 264

Epilogue 287

Acknowledgments 293

References 297

Index 323

Editorial Reviews

“Charles Briggs, long our guide in learning how to ask, leads us in this brilliant collection toward learning how to unthink—unthink the need for policing disciplinary boundaries, unthink the ideological distinction between sophisticated academic and unreflective folk, unthink the presumption that we scholars are needed to give voice to the voiceless. A profoundly illuminating guide to the energizing potential of opening oneself to disruption and dialogue in research.”
—Richard Bauman, Indiana University, Bloomington
 
“I know of no other single volume in folklore that offers this particular map of key issues connecting folklore studies to other disciplines. It should be required reading on graduate folklore syllabi and will inspire some healthy controversy, specifically about the impact and inherent politics of the discipline.”
—Margaret Mills, The Ohio State University
 
“A significant contribution, offering arresting insights on topics that will certainly capture the attention of many folklorists.”
—Erika Brady, Western Kentucky University
 

“Few folklorists have been more influential than Charles Briggs in shaping recent scholarship in the field.”
—Journal of Folklore Research
 

From the Publisher