Containment, carcerality and contagion
WP4 builds on themes of containment, carcerality, and contagion in Tanzania. The research is sited at a small, planned resettlement community in the Rufiji District of Tanzania that was created by colonial quarantine measures for leprosy in the 1950s. In the present, the people still living in the Community include the original inhabitants who moved there with the illness in the mid-20th century, their families and descendants, and a staff of NGO-employed caretakers.
The continued presence of inhabitants in this community is a temporal anomaly. They have outlasted the practice of quarantine for leprosy, the colonial administrators and missionaries who previously governed the village, and even the disease itself, which has had an available cure for decades. The result is an ambiguously voluntary enclosure in a landscape saturated by the past- made-present, and a community that lives at the intersection of multiple and competing histories of power over bodies.
From the vantage point of one particular leprosy community, this project examines the lasting presence of a 20th century colonial drive toward carceral quarantine and containment as epidemic response. Our attention to the built environment of leprosy isolation, and its lasting material infrastructure, offers a glimpse into how historical traces of confinement continue to shape daily life. In parallel, it considers the vital materiality of leprosy on the skin of those effected.
Leprosy often leaves traces in the form of scarring, rashes, or growths. In addition to these material traces—the result of past actions of a slow-growing bacteria—their skin is also the site of other, competing forms of power. Skin is a multivalent signifier in Tanzania: a bodily boundary within therapeutic regimes; a surface defined by racial capitalism; and a commodity that circulates within a Tanzanian occult economy. This project questions how this bacterial pathogen sits alongside the other vital materialities and histories of skin in Tanzania.
Combining an attentiveness at the intersecting scales of bodies and infrastructures, this ethnographic and historical project asks: what are the particular, heritable traces that emerge from carceral techniques of control over pathogens, skin-bound bodies, and land?
Aims
To trace the development, abandonment, and shifts in the carceral logics and infrastructures of disease control in Tanzania, from the late colonial period, through missionization, into the present moment of NGO-managed care. To identify resonances between the politics of containment at the village-level and the politics of the skin as a bodily boundary.
Questions
- How do carceral logics outlast both the conditions of colonial control and epidemic disease control?
- How do these structures of carcerality continue to have a presence in everyday human and nonhuman life, both within and across generations?
- And how do the competing powers of containment at the level of the collective community also emerge and persist materially on the body itself, especially on the skin?
Approach
“The field” in ethnographic research is often an unstable entity, and the ethnographic targeting of a “site” must often involve the artificial or discursive fixing of boundaries. In an ethnography of containment, however, the ongoing projects of boundary-making are themselves central to the work. For WP4, we plan to situate ourselves at the leprosy resettlement community for six months, and to stay attentive to the ways that things move, or don’t move, across its boundaries. How are the borders of the village materially marked, and what are the histories of those materializations? What things—including crafts for sale, agricultural crops, medical educational materials, medications, anthropologists, and contagious diseases—move in and out of this planned landscape, and how? These strategies will offer insights into the ways that a former quarantine settlement continues to successfully contain bodies, pathogens, and objects—if indeed it ever did.
In addition, we will be getting to know the community members themselves through ethnographic methods. The people with leprosy, including those who have already been cured but remain within the community, carry with them both traces of a pathogen in their bodies and in their memories. Their embodied experiences can contribute perspectives on the multiple forms of power that are enacted through the skin. We will pay particular attention to intergenerational ties, and how people think about embedded relations of inheritance in this place where land has been parceled out based on disease status. And finally, we will interview the NGO workers, who can speak to the ways that they see their own work as spatiotemporally bounded, both in this community and beyond.
Film as Collaborative Method
WP4 is also rooted in an ethnographic ethics of collaborative filmmaking as both research methodology and form of dissemination. We will work with residents to design and produce an experimental ethnographic film around this larger project theme of “containment.” Together, we will think about how research dissemination and art produce traces, and the particular ethics of creating visual and sonic traces on film.