Dis/ability as an Emerging Global Identity: Im/material Entanglements of Congolese People in Kinshasa and the Diaspora

This work is grounded in the ‘alongly integrated knowledge’ of people from Kinshasa, the capital of DR Congo, and Belgium who identify with the condition of physical impairment. The research has mainly been an exercise in thinking about something that seems rather limited in relation to something that appears to be unbounded.

This anthropological research starts from corporeality or the lived (co-)experience. The main participants in this research are people with a visible physical impairment. A combination of different qualitative research methods are used such as multi-sited fieldwork in Kinshasa, DR Congo, and Belgium; narrative analysis; following the ‘thing’; participant observation; documenting, interviews; and (evocative) writing. During the research the focus was on feelings of otherness, and the idea ofbeing different.

Many researchers have reflected about the difficulty to not only grasp ‘disability’ as a concept but also as a ‘lived reality’. This study examines the grounds from which it emerges as an identity for the people involved in my research. Thus, I examine the ‘appearance’ of ‘dis/ability’ within a particular environment, and argue that a critical analytic disentanglement of those things that bring it into appearance, can throw light onto and at the same time critique a contemporary global environment that ‘manufactures’ particular ‘personae’. What mechanisms make that ‘no-thing’ becomes some-thing? How does a person with impairment become a person with a dis/ability in a global environment?

In general, this research is about following ‘things’ and ‘lines’. I search for knots when lines entangle. These knots appear as ‘things’, and the dis/abled body is such a thing. Knots are the result of ‘bindings’. To explore how a human being with a bodily difference relates to an environment I adopted an Ingoldian-Hodderian perspective of meshwork and entanglement. How do people become some‘thing’? Or, how does ‘dis/ability’ emerge from a (global) environment? Standpoint Theory and Entanglement Theory are used to study how things come into ‘being’ in an ‘open’ environment and become complex lived realities. The approach is rhizomatic and experimental.

The main aim of the research is to show the (rhizomatic) complexity of these entanglements and especially how much is lost when someone is reduced to (and reproduced as) one single ‘thing’.

My objective in this work is to give more insight into what it means to be a person with impairment in a global environment; how do people with an impairment (creatively) engage with the ‘global’? To what extent are possibilities to enable a future in a global environment bound to a specific body entangled with its environment? To answer these questions I use different points of entry to think about ‘dis/ability’ as simultaneously local and global. It is my thesis that ‘dis/ability’ (identity) is experienced as a time-space compression and that it emerges as a (global) biosocial form of being in the world.