front cover of Unlearning
Unlearning
Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge
Charles L. Briggs
Utah State University Press, 2021
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.
 
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front cover of Unlearning the Language of Conquest
Unlearning the Language of Conquest
Scholars Expose Anti-Indianism in America
Edited by Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs)
University of Texas Press, 2006

Responding to anti-Indianism in America, the wide-ranging perspectives culled in Unlearning the Language of Conquest present a provocative account of the contemporary hegemony still at work today, whether conscious or unconscious. Four Arrows has gathered a rich collection of voices and topics, including:

  • Waziyatawin Angela Cavender Wilson's "Burning Down the House: Laura Ingalls Wilder and American Colonialism," which probes the mentality of hatred woven within the pages of this iconographic children's literature.
  • Vine Deloria's "Conquest Masquerading as Law," examining the effect of anti-Indian prejudice on decisions in U.S. federal law.
  • David N. Gibb's "The Question of Whitewashing in American History and Social Science," featuring a candid discussion of the spurious relationship between sources of academic funding and the types of research allowed or discouraged.
  • Barbara Alice Mann's "Where Are Your Women? Missing in Action," displaying the exclusion of Native American women in curricula that purport to illuminate the history of Indigenous Peoples.

Bringing to light crucial information and perspectives on an aspect of humanity that pervades not only U.S. history but also current sustainability, sociology, and the ability to craft accurate understandings of the population as a whole, Unlearning the Language of Conquest yields a liberating new lexis for realistic dialogues.

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