Few folklorists have been more influential than Charles Briggs in shaping recent scholarship in the field. Briggs’s seminal work on performance, genre, and poetics are foundational for performance-centered approaches to the discipline. His scholarship engaging disciplinary genealogies and in the folkloristics of health continue to be requisite reading in graduate folklore classes. Briggs’s career has covered such wide-ranging topics as woodcarving, social science interviewing, legend and pandemics, and the intersections of folklore and media. Briggs’s new book, Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge, anthologizes some of the breadth of this research over nine chapters, many of which will be familiar to folklorists, along with one new addition.
The real value of the collection comes in the new glue that holds its total of ten chapters together. The book’s title, Unlearning, provides one part of the thread. Briggs frames the collection through interrogating the politics of knowledge production. Briggs displays a vulnerability in reframing this theory-heavy collection with memoir, through a linear history of his “unlearning” from childhood to the present. Briggs writes about what he learned from mentors, collaborators, scholars, artisans, and even nonhumans, some near and familiar to readers and others more distant. He offers context, beyond standard exercises in ethnographic reflexivity, for how he was a “Chicano wannabe” (26) growing up in New Mexico, and about his early work on woodcarving and verbal art in Cordova. Readers get a sense of “how he learned how to ask” with descriptions of his failed early attempts at interviewing and, finally, how he came to understand the inequities of epidemics in Santiago Rivera in Venezuela.
The book’s first section includes some of Briggs’s most well-known articles that complicate genealogies for our field. It is here that Briggs is at his best as he introduces an additional thread that runs throughout the volume—boundary work—though Briggs pushes at the edges of folklore scholarship and folklore’s place in the disciplines across the entire collection. The first section includes Briggs’s well-known article from the grand theory in folklore special issue of Journal of Folklore Research on vernacular theorizing and a chapter revising and extending the utility of ethnopoetics for understanding the circulation of forms. Two additional chapters consider the revolutionary insights of Américo Paredes’s work and the coloniality of folkloristics. Here is where the volume is its most valuable. Through new framings, Briggs puts his older chapters on Paredes and the coloniality of folklore in explicit dialogue with each other.
The second section, which connects Briggs’s work on poetics and performance to psychoanalytic perspectives, again pushes at the edges of folklore scholarship by reinvigorating discussions that would have been familiar to his predecessor in folklore at Berkeley, Alan Dundes. Beyond simply writing about connections between psychoanalysis and performance theory, Briggs offers Freud’s work as a precursor to poetics and performance approaches in folklore. He calls this assertion risky; he’s right. An additional chapter displays Briggs’s creativity as he expands ethnographic genres through an “experiment in ethnographic writing” (46) in the form of a letter to Freud.
The third and final section anthologizes Briggs’s recent work in medical anthropology and media studies. The first two chapters put forward arguments about what forms the new folkloristics of health and media might respectively take, followed by two chapters which provide examples of what these new perspectives could look like in practice. The last of these examples is the only completely new chapter of the volume. Briggs importantly argues that with respect to folk medicine there have been few “galvanizing new concepts or theories that become necessary reading for all folklorists” (198). Though his claim in the chapter is limited to the folkloristics of health, it just as well might serve as Briggs’s modus operandi throughout the volume, as he looks for discipline-wide impact across research in a range of genres and subfields of folklore.
The book ends with a short epilogue that brings Briggs’s earlier writing in dialogue with the COVID-19 pandemic. It is here that Briggs makes an explicit case for the relevance of mediatization, circulation, and poetics beyond discrete disciplinary concerns. Briggs offers an exhortation to folklorists to apply the theory he develops not as isolated case studies but through thinking about intersections and connections between them. Early in the volume, Briggs puts forward a set of “principles for unlearning” (44) that all new fieldworkers would do well to follow. Among them is the idea that fieldwork holds the capacity to change one’s thinking long after the immediate period of fieldwork is complete. The present volume is an extended demonstration of just that.
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[Review length: 762 words • Review posted on November 4, 2022]