‘Its name is Awetasc’: devices and the everyday life of people with physical disability in Ethiopia

Abstract

Abstract This article aims to shed light on the institutions involved in spreading a ‘culture of rehabilitation’ and distributing devices (crutches, wheelchairs and protheses) in Tigray, where rehabilitation is strictly bound to the development agenda and to the ‘modernization’ of the country. Moreover, it questions the ways in which people, in practice, deal with such devices: in some cases, they are perceived as useful; in others, they are considered as something requiring a hard process of adjustment and marking a bodily difference. How is the ‘deviced’ body experienced? Are there some ‘techniques of the body’ that resist the biopolitical devices imposed by the culture of rehabilitation? I answer these questions through evidence collected during ethnographic fieldwork carried out between October 2014 and August 2015 in the regional state of Tigray, Ethiopia.