Paper short abstract:

The paper aims to explore the ambiguous relation between devices and people with physical disability in the urban context of Mekelle, the capital city of Tigray (Ethiopia). It investigates how devices are distributed and how they are experienced by people with disability in everyday life.

Paper long abstract:

It is April 2015. I'm with Rahel in her house, we are drinking ethiopian coffee and I'm drawing her portrait. Looking at the painting, she tells me: "You forgot Awetasc!" And she points at her crutch. Rahel is a woman with physical disability, a victim of polio. She does not agree with that biomedical Explanatory Model: according to her, when she was young, a spirit named nefyio took her, got angry and left these signs on her body. Rahel named her crutch Awetasc: in Tigrinya, it literally means "something that allows you to go out". Do devices help people with disability in the urban context of Mekelle, the capital city of Tigray, where environmental barriers are widespread and transportation means are not accessible?

This paper aims to shed light on the institutions involved in spreading a "culture of rehabilitation" and distributing devices (crutches, wheelchairs or bambula, prosthesis). Moreover, it questions the ways in which people face with them: in some cases they are perceived as useful helps; in others, they are considered as something requiring a hard process of adjustment and remarking a bodily difference. How is the "deviced" body experienced? Are there some "techniques of the body" (Mauss, 1965) resisting to the biopolitical device imposed by the culture of rehabilitation? I will try to answer these questions through the evidences collected during an ethnographic fieldwork carried out between October 2014 and August 2015 in the Regional State of Tigray, Ethiopia.