Contenu du sommaire : La santé : miroir des sociétés d'Asie du Sud-Est

Spirits mediums of the Four Palaces have been taking part for a long time, along with other religious specialists, in the Vietnamese therapeutic area. They have helped, and still do despite historical upheavals, taking care of different kind of illnesses through rituals and, more generally, through spirits' interventions. If healing is only one side of the worship, beside religious, political and territorial issues, it is one of the main issues addressed to the spirits. This paper investigates healing dimensions of the worship which are of two kinds : performing spirit possession in order to cure others or in order to cure themselves. Indeed, the disciples seek health, harmony in family life, success in business or education, by the spirits and their mediums. Moreover, as for other spirit possession cults, illness often lies at the origin of the process that leads to regular spirit possession. For that purpose, some mediums and some spirits have special healing powers. Lastly, this paper analyses some transformations of the mediums' social role.

In Arakan, sickness-related conceptions and therapeutic practices issuing from Theravada Buddhism, astrology, spirits cult and medicine form a meaningful and hierarchical whole. This whole is meaningful because patients and healers consider that it is the combination of various conceptions and various practices which makes sense and which guarantees the succes of the healing treatement. The whole is hierarchical because conceptions and practices are organised into a hierarchy where Buddhism occupies an hegemonic position. Nevertheless, in the healing field its contribution is limited. Only if combined with astrological, medical,..practices, buddhist practices can contribute to the prevention and the healing of sickness. Our attention is focused on the way this meaningful, hierarchical whole takes form into the practices of arakanese healers. By illustrating a case study, this article shows that healers often comulate various eterogeneous learnings and practices in the aim of acting at different dimensions of sickness : unbalance between body's elements, bad karma, bad planetary influence, agressions by evil beings.

Abstract : The notion of liang, common to all tai languages, denotes a multiplicity of practices : feeding, raising animals and children, adopting, taking care of one's elders, worshiping spirits. Firstly, this article proposes to explore, in the context if a rice-growing t'ai dam village of Northern Laos, the semantic field and variety of practices concerned by this notion. Whichever the beneficiary (animal, human or spirit) and whatever the action (raising, taking care or worshiping), liang always imply the initiation and the preservation of a relationship founded on the gift, real of symbolic, of food. Besides, it requires one sort of another of reciprocity. The second part of the article will be devoted to three case studies narrating difficulties encountered in the conception and raising of children. It will show that liang is all at once a given or achieved aptitude and a value essential to the reproduction and to the continuation of the life cycle.

This paper constitutes the first account on the history of Vietnamese private medical practice during the French domination over Indochina. It aims to revisit multiple historiographies and at the same time to suggest new ways of writing the history of colonial health and health care. First, I analyse the legal and political context in which Vietnamese private doctors could emerge as a professional and as a social group. Then I insist on the main characteristics of this medical community in terms of training, professional life and scientific and social activities. These Vietnamese doctors would appear as active agents and inventive experts who were to participate actively to the improvement of indigenous health. In order to better understand the activities of the group and their outcomes the paper will focus on one practitioner in particular, Dr. Nguyễn Văn Luyện (1898-1946). Luyện's biography helps to reveal Vietnamese doctors' polyvalence, expertise and dynamism both in terms of public health involvement and individual care ; in doing so one may be able to demonstrate that this new community of experts got in tune with the Vietnamese urban society it was supposed to care for, a society experiencing growing political, economic and social change at the time, especially during the interwar period.

In Cambodia, hospitals have been the stage of public health politics since the establishment of the French Protectorate. Today, hospital is still at the center of political, economical and social issues that spread across the whole Cambodian society. The theme of the present work is based on the ethnography of a public hospital in Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia. Fieldwork was conducted in a maternity ward by two researchers. While the first fieldwork observations concentrate on the workers' tasks, the second ethnographic fieldwork, conducted in the delivery ward of this hospital, examines more specifically the medical staff work. The hospital space can be described as “an open space with closed sections”. Within this open space, some areas are characterised by cleanness/dirtiness polarity, as well as domestic/professional polarity. This polarization delimits margins within the hospital space and controlled closed sections, as the “in camera” of a delivery ward. This hospital space analysis points out some issues linked to the social control of space in a hospital. In addition, the study deals with social interactions that organize the health workers lives and work. A double hierarchy, both professional and social, governs the hospital work organization. This hierarchy is reflected through the analysis of the distribution of the dirty work in the day-to-day life of the wards. The assumption could be made that hospital hierarchy partially reflects the social Cambodian hierarchy itself. However, social interactions are more subtle and complex, since the hierarchy can be affected by health workers' length of service, their political affiliation or even the patients social status. Despite the weight of this hierarchy, hospital employees adopt strategies of financial cooperation among themselves, which contributes to create a healthworkers-specific sociability. Hence, we can say that social interactions within the hospital are largely defined by a complex series of interactions between hierarchy and social cooperation.

This article portrays the life and activity of Muslim indigenous midwives in Satun province, Southern Thailand. Their art is transmitted almost exclusively through the maternal line and their traditional knowledge has been modified, transformed and reinvented but never abandoned, even as new biomedical information and techniques have been imparted during formal training. The indigenous midwives combine new knowledge with their more traditional practices such as use of incantations, ritual expertise, pre- and postpartum massages. They maintain their status in their communities thanks to their capacity to relate to both traditional and biomedical worlds. The reception of new equipment and the burden of bureaucratic control represent new elements in their lives and create a gap with the new generation of midwives.

In Cambodia, young women from rural areas come to live in Phnom Penh, the capital city, in order to find an activity able to meet their needs and those of their families. Among them, many are those who find an activity as a hostess bar karaoke. This activity induced physical and social changes, for these young women and tends to modify their relation to their femininity, their sexuality and their health. Considered by public health actors as “vulnerable populations” because of their activity as sex worker, these women are sometimes targeted for prevention and care activities in reproductive health. This contribution approaches certain aspects of the construction of health policies in the context of sex trade in Cambodia. Furthermore, the article seeks to explore how these young women deal with their new role and how they implement or negotiate care practices related to HIV prevention and unwanted pregnancies. The issues raised highlight how social and spatial migrations of women observed in Cambodia induce “unprecedented” practices in reproductive health as well as new forms of construction of gender identity and female body. Beyond that, this contribution proposes to revisit the concept of “sexual economic exchange” in the Cambodian context.

This article deals with the place of drug pluralism in Viêt Nam in the context of HIV/AIDS epidemic and the implementation of a new policy on pharmaceuticals which leads to the regulation of the traditional medicines. One of the principal problems in the management of HIV/AIDS in Viêt Nam was the absence of adapted, effective and accessible drugs. On the other hand, contrary to China, Viêt Nam moved towards a local production of generic drugs to meet the local needs and to lower the cost of HIV/AIDS treatment and care. Using a Vietnamese newspaper content analysis on this subject, we will try to understand economic, cultural and political issues behind the weak development of traditional drugs within the framework of HIV/AIDS management. We will show how the Westernisation during the colonial period, the opening of the country since the 1990's, the globalisation (seen here like the multiplication of the exchanges with the Western countries and the integration of Viêt Nam to the rest of the world and the ASEAN) and the life-cycle of pharmaceutical drugs, modified the recourse to drug pluralism as well as the national policy regarding health, with implications on the people's practices (ways to heal) in the medium and long term.

Based on both results and prospects, this article traces the gradual construction of a specific field of research, namely, the field of health, disease and care, mainly approached from historical and anthropological viewpoints. By identifying the key research schemes and dynamics of this latter, this work emphasizes significant scientific steps and shifts as well as its major breakthroughs in Southeast Asia. Such lines of research are relatively less explored in this geographical area than others. Following a chronological order in conjunction with a thematic one, while referring to key studies, the article demonstrates the depth and wealth of the debates, as well as the current vitality of this discipline.