Nuance of Zeruzeruness: Biologized Subjectivities and Everyday Practices of People with Albinism in Tanzania

My book manuscript explores life experiences, subjectivities, and socioeconomic conditions of people with albinism in Tanzania (e.g.; mainly the areas of Dar es Salaam and Iringa region in south-central Tanzania). The focus of my analysis therefore concerns the multiple ways in which people with albinism make sense of their bodies, conceive social and religious notions of normalcy, relate to each other in their everyday experiences, talk about their condition, create various networks of relatedness and support, and critically participate in the media discussions and humanitarian/human rights activities on their behalf. Ethnographically, I examine how actors with albinism, their relatives, friends, community members, as well as people without the condition that work at the fringes of media, religious, politics, and humanitarianism around albinism in Tanzania – health officials, traditional healers, and religious leaders, local politicians, and NGO members – produce nuanced and shared social ideas of albinism and influence the ways the condition is lived and experienced by people with it. 

Through the various chapters, the book mobilizes an original theoretical framework: “biological subjectivities.” The concept outlines the multiple ways social experiences, the inner selves, and emotional states of people with non-normative bodies (characterized by albinism or lighter skin complexions in the present case) interact, conflict, intertwine with, and are influenced by historical facts, indigenous etiological discourses, political and media debates, humanitarian actions, and activist involvements that have contributed to fossilize or/and dismantle the “biological” characteristics attached to those bodies in the long durée. As I argue, my book demonstrates the multiple disjuncture between discourses on conditions, produced by national and international media and humanitarian actors, and the daily life experiences of my research participants. While NGOs, government entities, and the media emphasize the constitution of biosocial and biological connections between people with albinism around narratives, my Tanzanian interlocutors constituted and experienced alternative versions of such embodiments intended as collective syntheses of biopolitical (biomedical, media and humanitarian) ordering, individual practices, and modes of relationality around forms of non-normative human difference.

During my Brocher residency, I plan to concentrate on revising three to four chapters of my forthcoming book and submit the revised manuscript to the publisher.