Charles L. Briggs

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Charles L. Briggs is an anthropologist who currently works at the University of California, Berkeley. Before working at Berkeley he held a position as Chair of the anthropology department at University of California, San Diego.

Contents 1 Biographical Information 2 Research Interests 3 Publications 4 Awards 5 References

[edit] Biographical Information

He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico on April 8, 1953. He got a BA in Anthropology, Psychology and Philosophy from Colorado College. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1981.

[edit] Research Interests

Charles L. Briggs is the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor in Folklore at Berkeley. He focuses on linguistic and medical anthropology, social theory, modernity, citizenship and the state, race, and violence. He has studied the tension between modernity and traditionality as socio-political processes in performance, focusing on jokes, proverbs, legends, myths, anecdotes, gossip, curing songs, and ritual wailing, along with how constructions of language and tradition have shaped the politics of modernity. He has conducted research with Latino/a populations in the Southwestern US and in Latin America. Current projects focus on revolutionary health care in Venezuela; how the state is “communicated” through the press ­particularly through health issues ­in Cuba, Venezuela, and the United States; and how violence is projected in legal, media, and medical institutions (Venezuela).

[edit] Publications

His books include Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (with Richard Bauman, 2003) and Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare (with Clara Mantini-Briggs, 2003).

[edit] Awards

He is the winner of the 2007 J.I. Staley Prize in Anthropology and the Rudolph Virchow Award in Medical Anthropology in 2006.

[edit] References

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