Sci‐fi chips and sickled cells

Abstract Over the past two decades in Tanzania, families have increasingly navigated the expanding prioritization of sickle cell disease within a broader pan‐African turn toward genomic medicine. Those diagnosed are compelled to reckon with kinship through genetic risk. At the same time, beyond the clinic, inherited naming practices—deeply embodied and temporally recursive—persist as powerful means of relating across generations. Building on a conversation with the physician‐poet Manka, who likens inherited names to “sci‐fi chips,” I develop a theory of technologies of inheritance: material‐semiotic forms that anchor and activate intergenerational ties. Juxtaposed stories of names and genes trace how Tanzanians traverse overlapping, often incommensurable logics of heritability. Technologies of inheritance offer an analytic for understanding kinship as fluid, flexible, and ontologically multiple.