Illness entities in West Africa
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2171166 |
|---|---|
| Authors | J P Olivier De Sardan (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1998 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 193-217 |
| Publication date | 1998-08-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Anthropology and Medicine (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1364-8470 • E-ISSN: 1469-2910 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13648470.1998.9964557 |
| OpenAlex | W1997427636 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 6 |
The ‘internal illness entities’, in various popular cultures of West Africa, transform a succession of symptoms, originating from inside the body, into a familiar disease, possessing the obviousness of a known entity with its own name, which parents and neighbours have already encountered, and which is associated with a variety of socially attested treatments. They are built on shared representations and practices. A detailed description of two such entities, the songhay‐zarma yeyni and weyno is first provided, showing the extent to which common (and very prosaic) knowledge that relates to ingestions and excretion adapts itself to social change and resists biomedical conceptualisation. A comparative analysis is thus proposed, based on a wider corpus of related ‘internal illness entities’ in neighbouring cultures (from Mali, Niger, Burkina, and Ivory Coast): although differing and untranslatable, they share a common family resemblance, due to several logics that cut across them and underlie their semiology (entityness, motion, transformation, exteriorization, activation, and fragmentation)
Biology · Cote d ivoire · Fragmentation (computing · Geography · Humanities · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics · African Studies and Ethnography · Computer Science · History · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Migration, Identity, and Health · Philosophy · Ecology
| Citations per year | 0.21 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2012 - 2026 (15) |
| Highly cited | No |