Abstract
How do bodies inherit in ways that exceed the limits of genetic logics of time and materiality? In this paper, I introduce some of the core material for my book project on the inheritance of the genetic blood disorder known as sickle cell disease in Tanzania. Increasingly over the past decade, sickle cell disease has become a health priority across several countries in Africa, especially in Tanzania. As part of the so-called “genomic revolution in Africa,” there is a growing presence of medical research, clinical care, and community-based organizations targeting diseases that are passed down via DNA. Sickle cell receives special attention in these Pan-African advocacy and research circles as a particularly African disease that is widespread but historically “forgotten.” Here, the characterization “forgotten” belies the haunting presence of deeply racist and eugenic past that defined sickle cell research in the early 20th century. In my talk, I grapple with the place of racializing, nationalist, and colonial histories as they continue to shape the embodied, lived experience of Tanzanians with sickle cell in the present. Drawing on a framework of feminist science studies and African philosophy, I argue that DNA and diseased blood cells are the instantiations of relationships beyond those of biological and reproductive kin. That is, the genetic inheritance of sickling alleles participates in active and nonlinear forms of material remembrance across generations. This expanded notion of intergenerational relations through a diagnosed body refigures postcolonial genetic medicine as just one possible assemblage of the material temporalities of power, knowledge, and kin in an African present.
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 is 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 from her dissertation research. It 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.