Ethno-télémédecine africaine et transfert des pathologies liées à l’accouchement chez les Yebekolo d’Akonolinga, Cameroun. contribution à l’anthropologie médicale

Abstract

The title of this dissertation is: "African ethno-telemedicine and transfer of childbirth related pathologies among the Yebekolo of Akonolinga, Cameroon. Contribution to Medical Anthropology. '' Childbirth is the final act of reproduction and subsistence of the human species, in negro-culture, it is birth that gives a woman her existential meaning in company. Usually the birth is low and full of pain due to uterine contractions during labor, expulsion and delivery. However, through the transfer of childbirth-related pathologies, the Yebekolo of Akonolinga managed to give birth without experiencing any pain. Hence the emphasis on the mechanisms of this therapy in this dissertation. From this research problem arises a main question, the formulation of which is as follows: Through ethno-telemedicine, what are the therapeutic meanings and the cultural meanings of the transfer of pathologies linked to childbirth? In view of this research question, we emitted a main hypothesis stipulated as follows: The transfer of pathologies linked to childbirth would be a female therapy of remote medicine which functions as an ordeal of childbirth among the Yebekolo who’s a magico-medicinal essence allows for the management of childbirth pathologies. The methodology used for this work takes as the documentary research whose main technique was the snowball strategy which allowed us to collect the secondary data; And the fieldwork which was essentially qualitative because having called as a collection technique direct observation, individual and in-depth interview, and life stories; the collection tools were the observation guide and the interview guide. After saturating the necessary information, we had a large amount of primary data which required a very specific analysis and interpretation. For the analysis we used content analysis for textual data and iconographic analysis for pictorial, graphical and schematic data. Interpretation, for its part, took place through a theoretical framework backed by the functionalism of Malinowski (1922) and Merton (1949), symbolism and the theory of cultural interpretation of Geertz (1973). The major results of this work are three in number. First of all, among the Yebekolo the transfer of pathologies linked to childbirth takes on the meaning of a medical ordeal that integrates both crypto-medicine, reflected by interference with the divine during therapy, and telemedicine, due to the fact that pathologies are transmitted without contact between the traditional therapist who transfers and the spouse who is the receptacle. Then, the mechanisms of the transfer of pathologies linked to childbirth lean on the cryptic Extraction-Conservation-transfer with a spiritual significance which reveals to us the Yebekolo culturalities on the medicinal beliefs of the elements of the nature. Finally, the transfer of pathologies is intended to be a cultural phenomenon, because there is a pheno-transfer of pathologies (physical and psychic dimensions) which integrates the actors, the actants of the transfer, and the state of mind of the parturient; And a crypto-transfer (spiritual dimension) which translates all interference with the invisible world, the world of the divine.