Chapitre 4. The recognition and value of traditional care practices in french overseas territories: a singular and contemporary example from French Polynesia.

Abstract

In French Polynesia (the Pacific), the knowledge and practices of traditional therapies, inherited from cultural specificities sometimes thousands of years old, were mostly, during the process of cultural integration that took place during the colonial period, neglected, side-lined, or disqualified by the public powers concerned. A state of tension is palpable in the hospital care service, where, on a daily basis, the medical staff experience socio-cultural resistance and incomprehension for which their education and training have not prepared them. By means of a diachronic approach, the article presents both the ways and the places of the traditional medicine at the heart of the Polynesian world, which are underpinned by a system of cosmogonic and symbolic representations, while also presenting the points of tension which derive from local, social, and sanitary specificities that are currently neither recognized nor taken on board by the powers that be. In this context, the article discusses a singular experiment in medical plurality, carried out by the pulmonology service at the hospital of Papeete. This first ethnological exploration of healthcare in a multicultural overseas territory is part of a healthcare dynamic already being put into practice by a body of carers within the pulmonology service of the Centre Hospitalier en Polynésie Française (CHPF), who are looking for new ways of thinking and caring in touch with local constraint and specificities. Drawing on these various research perspectives, it is important to try and sketch out, by means of an anthropological reflection on care, some paths for understanding a divisive situation which puts in danger the very practice of care.