Modeles et pragmatique, activation et repetition: Reflexions sur la causalite de la maladie chez les Senoufo de Cote D'ivoire

Abstract

The distinction between a priori and a posteriori causality is a necessary methodological pre-condition for the analysis of explanatory assertions about sickness. Part one, on a priori causality, will not undertake a somewhat absurd reconstruction of a Senoufo medical ‘taxonomy’, it will rather describe the formal types of connections, necessary or possible, between a symptom and the three elements of its causal configuration: cause, agent, and origin. It is to be emphasized that there is a great heterogeneity between the logic of a priori ‘codes’ and pragmatic a posteriori elaborations. What is the reason for such a heterogeneity?

The second section shows that Senoufo therapeutic behaviours and institutions function in a closed and autonomous manner in relation to the interpretive register: the introduction of new therapeutic alternatives (notably Islamic or biomédical) do not necessarily lead to a change in causal thought. Furthermore R. Horton's conception of cause switching in West African medical thought must be criticized because of the inadequacy of the related notion of ‘remedial prescription’ and his lack of distinction between cause, agent, and origin.

Finally, an effort is made to separate out the principle of coherence which accounts as much for the diversity of a priori explanatory models and observed divinatory and therapeutic practices, as for the closure of the etiological field in relation to external systems. The analysis of the complex institution of sãdoho leads to the conclusion that: (1) the sickness event is conceived as the reactivation of an earlier event; it is immediately reinserted and stored in the collective memory of the matrilineage: (2) the divinatory device has the function of feeding this memory with its proper constituent instances and recollections: (3) initiation to sãdoho, which reactualizes and transfers all previously registered and stored sickness etiologies upon a potential diviner of the matrilineage, illustrates the general conception of causality based on the principle of repetition. This permits an understanding of several (taits peculiar to the medical pluralism of the Senoufo.