Event location
Guest Speaker Seminars will take place at Seminar Room 218, FHH (Frederik Holsts hus), 12:15-13:30.
Zoom link for those wishing to attend online.
Abstract
How can ethnography engage with real and often lethal biomedical diseases without reinforcing or deferring to the universalizing power of global biomedicine? In recent decades, anthropologists and adjacent scholars have studied how the objects of biomedical science—technologies, bodies, diseases, and their parts—are not a priori things-in-the-world, but are rather co-constituted through historical, political, and affective relationships both within and beyond the clinic. In this way, medical objects can be productively understood as indexing relations of power and their social worlds, or what Julie Livingston aptly calls “diagnosis as history.” My own ethnographic research in Tanzania from 2013 to 2020 expanded on this provocation by approaching the genetically inherited disorder of sickle cell disease not as an object of research, but as a method. By taking sickle cell as method, I mean that I actively became entangled with the constellation of historical, material, and sociocultural relations that intersect under the sign of sickle cell in Tanzania in the twenty-first century. Sickle cell disease guided my movements throughout an emergent fieldsite both within and far beyond biomedical institutions. The networks that emerged for me to follow were not always about sickle cell, but rather flowed outward from the perspective of sickle cell.
This paper reflects on the possibilities opened up by taking a diagnosis as method in ethnographic praxis. I suggest that this approach lends itself to a unique relationship between ethnographer, “field,” and biomedical science—one that is more reflective of everyday therapeutic life in Tanzania and elsewhere. And further, enacting diagnosis as method lends itself to ethnographic intervention into the privileged domain of natural-scientific expertise, refusing to give primacy to strictly biological epistemologies. Finally, I consider the kinds of multidisciplinary collaborative work that becomes available through this methodological strategy, inclusive of diagnosed people, doctors, activists, artists, and caregivers. The talk offers insights not into what sickle cell disease is in Tanzania but rather how sickle cell disease, and disease categories more generally, can position us more ethically within ethnographic practice
Bio:
Rebekah Ciribassi is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University Oslo. As part of the Epidemic Traces project, Rebekah will be working on a multimodal collaborative research project, “Containment and Flow: Traces of Quarantine on the Rufiji River”, located in an active resettlement community that was built in the 1950s to control leprosy in Rufiji, Tanzania. She is also working on a book project which explores what happens when African biomedicine shifts the temporality of its focus from the short-term immediacy of communicable disease care toward the intergenerational scope of a genetically inherited, chronic illness—namely, sickle cell disease. The question at the core of this work—how do biogenetic and extra-biomedical forms of heritability coexist and shape lived experiences of the past-made-present in Tanzania?—attends to the frictions, resonances, and entanglements between genetic inheritance and other modes of relating across intergenerational time. Rebekah received her PhD from Cornell University in 2022. Prior to that, she received an MPH in Community Health Sciences and an MA in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago Anthropology and Global Health Program. Rebekah’s scholarly interests include biomedical science, bodily inheritance, and the politics of temporality in late- and post-colonial Tanzania. She is also interested in multimodal methods, including filmmaking, experimental visual art, and science fiction as ethnographic storytelling.