Mohamed Yunus Rafiq

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Affiliation: Visiting
Education: BA Indiana University, Blooming; MA Yale University; PhD Brown University

myr1@nyu.edu

Research Websites: NYU Shanghai Center for Global Health Equity

Research Areas: Public Health; Cancer; Semiotics and Communicative Practices in Health; African Studdies; Biopolitics; Islam

M. Yunus Rafiq is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at NYU Shanghai and a Global Network Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at NYU. He is a trained medical anthropologist focusing on public health, religion, and communicative practices in Tanzania. He received his PhD from Brown University in 2017 and, before joining New York University, worked on two large-scale randomized control trials aimed at improving maternal and child health and increasing the uptake of modern contraceptives in rural Tanzania. His research has been funded by Wenner-Gren, Fulbright-Hays, Hewlett, the Ash Center at the Kennedy School, and the American Philosophical Society.

Rafiq’s research examines how governmental and non-governmental health programs mobilize faith-based religious intermediaries to manifest public health governance and biopolitical agendas. It explores how religion is defined by biomedical programs and the ways these programs transform religion. His research questions how religion and biopolitical programs in the post-colony are reassembled to create new forms of authority, governance, and power.

Rafiq’s book project is an ethnography of "religious leaders" working on family planning campaigns in rural post-socialist Tanzania. Over the past three decades, there has been a growing interest in and demand for religious leaders to act as intermediaries between NGO-led public programs and the wider citizenry. NGOs and government agencies often enlist religious leaders to implement and legitimize morally sensitive programs, such as family planning. However, the category of religious leaders is contested and does not refer to a homogeneous group. Individuals who claim this identity do not necessarily have the social capital that NGOs might imagine. In Islam, various religious figures, such as healers, mosque supervisors, and teachers, may not identify as religious leaders at all, viewing the term as a government-imposed secular category. Nevertheless, NGOs apply the term "religious leaders" universally to refer to individuals who have access to the masses and wield authority. The book project seeks to shed light on how a diverse group of rural Muslim figures are constructed as "religious leaders" and deployed to advance biopolitical governance and statecraft.

His second research project explores the "politics of healing" in the context of the recent global health alarm regarding the impending cancer epidemic in Africa. This project focuses on decolonizing aspects of language and communicative practices in an urban Tanzanian context. Titled The Semantic Landscapes of Cancer, this research program delves into how urban Tanzanian communities use the Swahili language to speak, interpret, and comment on the possibilities and threats to life that cancer entails. In line with a longstanding tradition in African anthropology, the project treats indigenous terms used by respondents as mini-theories and everyday sense-making regarding the forces that seek to (un)make their lives. Initial research findings on the semantics and linguistics of cancer in urban Tanzania were published in BMJ Global Health in August 2023 and Social Science & Medicine in July 2024.