rebekac

• Ciribassi, Rebekah (2025). Sci‐fi chips and sickled cells. American Ethnologist. ISSN 0094-0496. 52(4), s. 472–483. doi: 10.1111/amet.70018. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Over the past two decades in Tanzania, families have increasingly navigated the expanding prioritization of sickle cell disease within a broader pan‐African turn toward genomic medicine. Those diagnosed are compelled to reckon with kinship through genetic risk. At the same time, beyond the clinic, inherited naming practices—deeply embodied and temporally recursive—persist as powerful means of relating across generations. Building on a conversation with the physician‐poet Manka, who likens inherited names to “sci‐fi chips,” I develop a theory of technologies of inheritance: material‐semiotic forms that anchor and activate intergenerational ties. Juxtaposed stories of names and genes trace how Tanzanians traverse overlapping, often incommensurable logics of heritability. Technologies of inheritance offer an analytic for understanding kinship as fluid, flexible, and ontologically multiple.

Se alle arbeider i NVA

• Ciribassi, Rebekah Marie (2024). Commensurability and Carceral Spaces: Nascent reflections on possibilities for abolitionist pedagogy, ethnography, and practice. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  In her 2022 piece, “Abolition in the Clutch,” Savanna Shange challenges us to think about the incommensurabilities between abolitionist praxis and the disciplinary work of anthropology. How can we reconcile our identities as theorists and ethnographers with our commitments to literally end the violence of a carceral state—all while refusing to water down abolition into a theoretical metaphor? In 2021-2023, I was an instructor in a prison education program, teaching anthropology to incarcerated students in upstate New York. This paper reflects on my attempts to think with those incarcerated students’ insights as I developed a new ethnographic project in 2024. The new research is sited within an old leprosy isolation village created under British colonialism in Tanzania in the 1950s. This place typifies colonial tactics of spatial and bodily enclosure that Bernault (2003) historicized as central to the making of prisons in colonial Africa. Today, leprosy is treatable, and the spatial strategy of disease containment has been long disbanded. Remaining residents—people cured of leprosy and three generations of their descendants—live at this place in the remains of a carceral past. The ethnography asks: what forms of material traces remain after the infrastructures of containment are unmade? In this paper, I question how these ethnographic insights into the afterlives of containment could come to actually matter for my former students in that New York prison and others. By highlighting how this research emerged from and influences my abolitionist commitments, I consider how anthropological teaching, research, and active abolitionist work might come together as mutually supportive practices.

• Ciribassi, Rebekah Marie (2024). An ethics of scale: Making the "global" and the "local" in new genetic medicine in Tanzania. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

Se alle arbeider i NVA