L’« exceptionnalité » d’Ebola et les « réticences » populaires en Guinée-Conakry. Réflexions à partir d’une approche d’anthropologie symétrique

Abstract

Cet article discute de l’exceptionnalité de l’épidémie Ebola telle que vécue en Guinée-Conakry et analyse les rationalités à l’œuvre dans les rumeurs et les attitudes à l’égard des activités et des équipes de la « Riposte », qualifiées de « réticences » par l’OMS. Il adopte une perspective d’anthropologie symétrique, qui consiste à questionner aussi bien le contexte socioculturel et historico-politique que les aspects techniques de ce dispositif de lutte sans concéder de privilège épistémologique à l’un des deux aspects. Si la Riposte a justifié l’imposition de normes de biosécurité par le caractère exceptionnel de l’épidémie d’Ebola, les populations, elles, ne la vivent pas toujours comme un événement « hors normes ». Leurs discours et leurs comportements à son égard sont nourris par une longue histoire socioculturelle et prennent corps dans une économie politique locale et nationale faite de méfiances et de clivages ethniques. Plus spécifiquement, les attitudes face aux enterrements dignes et sécurisés expriment une critique d’un dispositif technique centré sur la biosécurité, qui retire aux familles leurs droits et nie leur capacité de gestion sécuritaire de l’espace mortuaire. Finalement, les attitudes dites réticentes témoignent d’une réaction à une violence structurelle produite par la Riposte et correspondent à des formes de mobilisation pour revendiquer une meilleure reconnaissance du rôle des communautés dans la gestion de l’épidémie. Cet article souhaite prouver qu’une lecture critique et symétrique par l’anthropologie du dispositif de lutte n’est pas purement négative. Au contraire, elle fournit les moyens et les arguments d’une approche plus collaborative et plus respectueuse des droits et des devoirs des communautés, en éclairant les enjeux sociopolitiques et contextuels de l’épidémie.

Three Acts of Resistance during the 2014–16 West Africa Ebola Epidemic

“…The five authors were closely involved in the national (Sylvain Landry B. Faye, Frédéric Le Marcis, Almudena Mari Saez and Luisa Enria) and international Ebola response (Sharon Abramowitz) in different capacities: carrying out ethnographic research, providing guidance on the socio-cultural aspects of clinical interventions and community engagement, advising multiple international actors, and as animator of a global network aimed at sharing information during the epidemic (Abramowitz, 2017;Anoko, 2014;Enria et al, 2016;Faye, 2015;Le Marcis, 2015;Moulin, 2015;Saez and Borchert, 2014). We conducted fieldwork, surveys, and interviews in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.…”

Crisis Communication During the Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: The Paradoxes of Decontextualized Contextualization

“…Looking back as far as at Jakobson's famous scheme of the functions of language (1960), which identified the context as a pivotal determinant of human communication, it is striking to see how communication, as a professional domain and practice, has paid little attention to this very dimension. In this respect, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa certainly acted as a powerful reminder: Most of international responders did not understand where they stood during the first months of the response, thus falling in all sorts of traps and pitfalls, causing much delays in necessary interventions: Ebola patients escaped; families and communities hid their ills; dead bodies were silently buried (Faye 2015;Moulin 2015); international funds vanished in the maze of national and regional bureaucracies. Puzzled by these facts, a common reaction among responders was to attribute these failures to backward beliefs, in affected countries, and to a lack of rationality (personal interviews, WHO; for a media account see Malagardis 2014).…”

“…As with every crisis of such scope, deep uncertainties created all kinds of new political, economic or social stakes, and opportunities (Klein 2007). Within affected localities, power relations were reconfigured by the epidemic: for example, some fractions of the people were able to seize working opportunities and contributed to staff the response; local political or moral figures, who were hired in the response to create trust between responders and communities, saw their social prestige increase or erode due to this position (Faye 2015); Ebola became a political stake during parliamentary elections in Liberia (NYT, December 4th, 2014), Guinea (Al Jazeera, October 10th, 2015), 4 as in the US during 2014 mid-term elections (Politico, October 10 2014; personal interviews at the US CDCs in Atlanta) due to an imported case and the development of a local transmission chain in Dallas. Communicators lamented about what they understood as political interferences; they also complained about media coverage, thus effectively ignoring that both politicians and the media conform to logic of actions articulated around different stakes and interests that those regulating public health experts' practices.…”

“…Last, internal tensions within countries also played a major role in complicating the response. Thus, entrenched conflicts between the central government and affected communities, in Guinea, fueled suspicion toward the response as a whole, be it domestic or international, since outsiders were being seen as working with the State, and since the State was often seen as a Trojan horse for foreign interests (Faye 2015).…”

“…Thus, misaligned expectations due to stereotyping and superficial knowledge prevailed on both sides of the response. Developing a "symmetrical anthropology" (Faye 2015;Latour 1997) of the response would thus have helped debunking mutual stereotypes and relativizing West African people's putative lack of rationality. Indeed, as some anthropologists have shown, popular resistance to public health interventions surely retained their own rationality (Faye 2015)-a given for any social scientist.…”