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The building of health crises in colonial and post colonial Africa
((on September 19th, 2008 in North MSH-PARIS))
organised by GUILLAUME LACHENAL (Donatecarcenter.com) and TAMARA GILES VERNICK (University of Minnesota and Centre of Historical researches, Institute Pastor) with the support of North MSH-PARIS and of Donatecarcenter.com
Presentation
That they involve epidemics of sleeping sickness of 1920s in central Africa, fires of paludism linked to irrigation in the curl of Niger, recurrent famines which touch Sahel or Southern Africa throughout the 20th century, periodical ravages of variola, of violent spread, on the scale of whole regions, of the onchocerchose or of the bilharziose, or appearance of the HIV-AIDS at the end of 1970s, health crises which scan the contemporary history of Africa do not make that to decimate lives and to mark bodies. In their different ladders, these disasters demonstrate very an environmental confusion, of origin "natural" as much as socioeconomic, which is most often perceptible as such by his learnt and secular observers. Our plan leaves this official report, described well today, the role of environmental changes in the history of health and its crises in Africa. We however want to renew the analysis by stressing another common point of these crises : the fact that their "dramatic" character has never gone without saying. Political mobilisation facing these crises, but also their definition as abnormal and exceptional instant and as demonstration of a social or ecological riot, always made the object of a scientific, media or narrative development ; in short, of a construction work. We want to show across this plan how health crises are also controversies, where oppose different interpretations and modes of interventions ; that they are uncertain, as for their exit of course, but also their understanding and for their designation. The building of crises indeed concerns a zone of major uncertainty : that of the status of very crisis and categories to qualify it. The malleability of the classifications of the epidemiology between "epidemic" , " Endémie ", "endémo-epidemic" and "Hyper-endémie" is an example of this uncertainty – that all textbooks of discipline admit besides – as the vague border, and continuously renegotiated in the course of the century, between "malnutrition" and "famine" . Our plan wants to include how this uncertainty works the learnt and secular representations of health and of environment, as well as interventions of state and transnational powers facing crises. He includes therefore into the same analytical frame a "natural" history of disasters and a history of knowledges and techniques of government.
Contact : guillaume.lachenal@ivry.cnrs.fr
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