Abstract
In 2014, West Africa was hit by the first large-scale outbreak of the Ebola virus epidemic. The event was widely recognized as exceptional, not only for how rapidly it spread, how long it lasted, and the scale of the humanitarian response but also, from the point of view of people in Guinea, for the attempt to resist, sometimes violently, the means used to respond to it. Our comparative ethnographic study of two Ebola Treatment Centres (Etc) set up by Doctors Without Borders in Guinea will detail how care was set up and organized. We will show that Etcs have several traits in common with the «camp-forms» that inhabit the contemporary world: border regions, epidemiological reasoning, the triage of populations and inally, the suppression of ordinary ethics. This is why the Ebola experience actually reveals the coming of a regime of global health governance inscribed within a postcolonial context that has populations in Guinea revisit their long historical relation to power characterized by violence and extraction. It is also emblematic of a world government that conjugates bio-politics with necro-politics.
| Translated title of the contribution | Encamping Guinea: Ebola and the postcolonial experience |
|---|---|
| Original language | French |
| Journal | Homme (France) |
| Issue number | 222 |
| Pages (from-to) | 57-90 |
| Number of pages | 34 |
| ISSN | 0439-4216 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2017 |
