Suchergebnisse

This paper follows the journey of the author when she had to go through a quarantine during the Ebola outbreak that hit Guinea between 2014 and 2015. While she was conducting her fieldwork at the Ebola treatment unit of Wonkifong, Veronica Gomez-Temesio unfortunately broke some biosecurity rules. As she fell ill few days later, she was suspected to have been infected by Ebola and was quarantined as a result. The text tells the story of her experience along with the journey of several patients quarantined in Wonkifong. Through these different stories, the article discusses how the humanitarian politics of triage reveals an inequality of life that is at the core of humanitarian practice. It shows how a personal incident led the author to introduce the concept of zombies in her work. ; This paper follows the journey of the author when she had to go through a quarantine during the Ebola outbreak that hit Guinea between 2014 and 2015. While she was conducting her fieldwork at the Ebola treatment unit of Wonkifong, Veronica Gomez-Temesio unfortunately broke some biosecurity rules. As she fell ill few days later, she was suspected to have been infected by Ebola and was quarantined as a result. The text tells the story of her experience along with the journey of several patients quarantined in Wonkifong. Through these different stories, the article discusses how the humanitarian politics of triage reveals an inequality of life that is at the core of humanitarian practice. It shows how a personal incident led the author to introduce the concept of zombies in her work.

ABSTRACTTreatment units were created all across the country with a mission to save lives when the Ebola outbreak hit Guinea in 2014. These units were exceptional sites of biomedical and biosecurity technology. Nevertheless, the concrete procedures to contain the virus reduced the people quarantined to dangerous bodies. The emergency therefore created zombies, haunting figures trapped between life and death. The figure of the zombie shed light on the failure of the humanitarian engagement: when humanitarianism was driven by an ethical imperative of saving lives at any cost, its concrete procedures failed to preserve political and social existence. Zombies also related to the legacy of the slave trade. Connecting the zombie with the postcolonial context of Guinea, I will argue that humanitarian teams were dealing with already devalued lives. Zombies is then another word for pariah citizens of a global world. But people never live in utter subjection. The zombie is thus not only a metaphor for the commodification of life. It also invokes a slave rebellion. Enduring the politics of saving lives, zombies nevertheless resisted the confinement: to the quarantine but also to our analytical gaze. Zombies are thus the ones who outlive not only death in life but also conceptual death. [life, violence, humanitarian aid, zombie, Ebola]

International audience ; 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 finally, 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. ; En 2014, la première épidémie massive de maladie à virus Ebola en Afrique de l'Ouest fut un événement exceptionnel tant par son étendue et sa durée que par l'ampleur de l'engagement des organisations humanitaires, mais aussi du point de vue des populations guinéennes qui tentèrent de résister, parfois violemment, au dispositif de réponse à l'épidémie. À partir d'une ethnographie comparée de deux centres de traitement Ebola (Cte) mis en place par Médecins sans frontières, nous rendrons compte de l'organisation des soins à l'intérieur de ces centres et nous montrerons que les Cte partagent plusieurs points communs avec les multiples « formes-camp » qui peuplent le monde contemporain : la frontière, la logique épidémiologique, le triage des populations et, enfin, la suppression de l'éthique ordinaire. C'est pourquoi l'expérience d'Ebola révèle en fait l'avènement d'un régime global de gouvernance de la santé qui s'inscrit dans un contexte postcolonial et renvoie les populations guinéennes à l'histoire longue de leur relation au pouvoir caractérisée par la violence et l'extraction. Elle est aussi emblématique d'un gouvernement du monde qui conjugue biopolitique et nécropolitique.

International audience ; 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 finally, 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. ; En 2014, la première épidémie massive de maladie à virus Ebola en Afrique de l'Ouest fut un événement exceptionnel tant par son étendue et sa durée que par l'ampleur de l'engagement des organisations humanitaires, mais aussi du point de vue des populations guinéennes qui tentèrent de résister, parfois violemment, au dispositif de réponse à l'épidémie. À partir d'une ethnographie comparée de deux centres de traitement Ebola (Cte) mis en place par Médecins sans frontières, nous rendrons compte de l'organisation des soins à l'intérieur de ces centres et nous montrerons que les Cte partagent plusieurs points communs avec les multiples « formes-camp » qui peuplent le monde contemporain : la frontière, la logique épidémiologique, le triage des populations et, enfin, la suppression de l'éthique ordinaire. C'est pourquoi l'expérience d'Ebola révèle en fait l'avènement d'un régime global de gouvernance de la santé qui s'inscrit dans un contexte postcolonial et renvoie les populations guinéennes à l'histoire longue de leur relation au pouvoir caractérisée par la violence et l'extraction. Elle est aussi emblématique d'un gouvernement du monde qui conjugue biopolitique et nécropolitique.

International audience ; 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 finally, 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. ; En 2014, la première épidémie massive de maladie à virus Ebola en Afrique de l'Ouest fut un événement exceptionnel tant par son étendue et sa durée que par l'ampleur de l'engagement des organisations humanitaires, mais aussi du point de vue des populations guinéennes qui tentèrent de résister, parfois violemment, au dispositif de réponse à l'épidémie. À partir d'une ethnographie comparée de deux centres de traitement Ebola (Cte) mis en place par Médecins sans frontières, nous rendrons compte de l'organisation des soins à l'intérieur de ces centres et nous montrerons que les Cte partagent plusieurs points communs avec les multiples « formes-camp » qui peuplent le monde contemporain : la frontière, la logique épidémiologique, le triage des populations et, enfin, la suppression de l'éthique ordinaire. C'est pourquoi l'expérience d'Ebola révèle en fait l'avènement d'un régime global de ...