M. Yunus Rafiq

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, region, 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, Ash Center at 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 re-assembled 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 homogenous 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 and Medicine in July 2024.

Select Publications

• Rafiq, M.Y. (2024), “Shehes and the State: The Role of Muslim Religious Leaders in Public Health Governance in Rural Tanzania", Farouk Topan et al (eds), Governance and Islam in East Africa: Muslims and the State, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and The Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, pp. 220–244.
• Krugman, Daniel, Litu, A, Mbeya,S and Rafiq, M.Y. “Cancer Linguistics and the Politics of Decolonizing Health Communication in Coastal Tanzania: Reflections from an Anthropological Investigation.” Social Science & Medicine (1982), vol. 354, 2024, pp. 117082-, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117082.
• Rafiq M.Y., Krugman DW, Bapumia F, Enumah Z, Wheatley H, Tungaraza K, Gerrets R, Mfuko S, Hall BJ, Kasogela O, Litunu A, Winch PJ. Kansa talk: mapping cancer terminologies in Bagamoyo, Tanzania towards dignity-based practice. BMJ Global Health. 2023 Aug;8(8):e012349. doi: 10.1136/bmjgh-2023-012349.
• Zhang L, Rafiq M.Y. “Governing through big data: An ethnographic exploration of invisible lives in China's digital surveillance of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic." Digital Health. 2023 April 25;9:20552076231170689. doi: 10.1177/20552076231170689
• Rafiq, M.Y. 2022. “Good, Bad Religious Leaders: Binary Talk in a Tanzanian Health Project.” Medical Anthropology. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2022.2132496
• Sissoko, B., Rafiq, M.Y., Wang, J.R. et al. “Social representations of malaria in a southern Malian community: an ethnographic qualitative study.” Malaria Journal 21, 276 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12936-022-04298-0
• Rafiq M.Y. “The Shehe You Need Me to Be: Worlds of Misrecognition in Tanzanian Development.” Ethnos. 2022 June 06. DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2022.2083650
• Enumah, Zachary Obinna, Rafiq, M.Y, Omar Juma, Frank Maynama, Hilary Ngude, Kent Stevens, and Joseph V. Sakran. “Access to Health Services among Forced Migrants in Tanzania: A Cluster Randomized Cross Sectional Study of 3,560 Congolese and Burundian Refugees.” Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health.
• Rafiq, M.Y., Wheatley H, Salti R, Shemdoe A, Baraka J, Mushi H. "I let others speak about condoms: Muslim religious leaders' selective engagement with an NGO-Led family planning project in rural Tanzania.” Social Science & Medicine. 2021 Dec 11; 293:114650. DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed. 2021.114650. PMID: 34915242.
• Rafiq, M.Y., and Derek Sheridan. “Even if the Chinese Grow Wings and Fly: Recasting Martial Arts in a Tanzanian Karate Dojo.” Anthropology and Humanism. 2021. DOI.org/10.1111/anhu.12355.
• Rafiq et al. “Who are CHWs? An Ethnographic Study of the multiple Identities of Community Health Workers in three rural Districts in Tanzania.” BMC Health Services Research. (2019) 19:712.
• Rafiq, M. Y. "Ethnographic Lesser Evils." Visual and New Media Review, Fieldsights, October 30, 2019. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/ethnographic-lesser-evils.

Education

• PhD, Anthropology
  Brown University
• MA, African Studies
  Yale University