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. His original research focus centered on the "Mexicano" population of his home state of New Mexico in the US. From then on he has focused his attention on the Warao, an Amerindian people of Delta Amacuro state in Venezuela. 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.
1992. 'Since I Am a Woman, I Will Chastise My Relatives': Gender, Reported Speech, and the production of Social Relations in Warao Ritual Wailing. American Ethnologist 19:337-61.
1993. Personal Sentiments and Polyphonic Voices in Warao Women's Ritual Wailing: Music and Poetics in a Critical and Collective Discourse. American Anthropologist 95:929-57.
1993. Theorizing Folklore: New Perspectives on the Politics of Culture. Western Folklore 52.
1996. Disorderly Discourse: Narrative, Conflict, and Social Inequality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
1996. The Politics of Discursive Authority in Research on the "Invention of Tradition." Cultural Anthropology 11:435-69.
1998. "You're a Liar—You're Just Like a Woman!" Constructing Dominant Ideologies of Language in Warao Men's Gossip. In Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, eds., Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, 229-55. New York: Oxford University Press.
2000. “Bad Mothers” and the Threat to Civil Society: Race, Cultural Reasoning, and the Institutionalization of Social Inequality in a Venezuelan Infanticide Trial. Law and Social Inquiry 25:299-354..
2002. Linguistic Magic Bullets in the Making of a Modernist Anthropology. American Anthropologist 104: 481-98.
2003. Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare. Berkeley: University of California Press..
2003. Voices of modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2003. Why Nation-States Can’ t Teach People to be Healthy: Power and Pragmatic Miscalculation in Public Discourses on Health. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17:287-321.
2004. Malthus' Anti-rhetorical Rhetoric, or, on the Magical Conversion of the Imaginary into the Real. In Categories and Contexts: Critical Studies in Qualitative Demography, ed. Simon Szreter, Hania Sholkamy, and A. Dharmaligam, pp. 57–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2004. Theorizing Modernity Conspiratorially: Science, Scale, and the Political Economy of Public Discourse in Explanations of a Cholera Epidemic. American Ethnologist 31:163-186.
2005. Genealogies of Race and Culture and the Failure of Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms: Rereading Franz Boas and W.E.B. Du Bois. Public Culture 17:75-100.
