Paper short abstract:

This paper brings insights from teaching anthropology in a New York prison together with new ethnographic research in a colonial-era leprosy containment village in Tanzania. I consider possibilities for assembling pedagogical, ethnographic, and abolitionist work toward undoing carceral violence.

Paper long abstract:

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 students’ insights as I developed a new ethnographic project. My 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 ethnographic insights into afterlives of containment could come to actually matter in that New York prison and elsewhere. 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.