Contenu du sommaire

Tanbav, meaning and etiology of an infantile disease in Reunion Island This article analyses the etiology of an illness affecting Reunion Island children still in infancy called tanbav, the syndrome « that the physician does not know of ». It endeavours to grasp its intricacies, not only describing a set of pathologies linked to the skin, the belly and the therapies associated with them, but also showing that it constitutes one of the complements to physical birth, by means of comparisons with other infancy rituals existing in the local society. Indeed, it is these various practices that will allow the child to accede to social birth by ridding him/her of ail the prénatal elements that he/she still harbours and that are likely to send him/her back to the beyond he/she is born of.

These past thirty years, the Cuban governement has emphasized its successes in public health. Concurrently, it has for a long time rejected the cumulative practice of diverse possession cuits (called religion in Havana) in the realm of marginality. The residents of Havana use increasingly, in a complementary way, the « religious » and biomedicals therapeutics, encouraged by therapists of both Systems. This article questions this situation, furtherly pronounced by the economic, political and social crisis that the country has been going through since 1990. Today, this has to do with juxtaposition. Will it evolve towards an interpenetration of explicative theories, in order to sustain individual or collective strategies aiming at apropriating the hegemony of cuban religious realm?

Collective action within interprofessional teams in health services In Quebec, primary health care services are founded on the principle of interprofessional collaboration. This paper describes how we constructed an understanding of the nature of interprofessional collaboration as it is experienced in primary care services. The empirical data developed in this study uncovered important difficulties associated with collaboration and a number of complications inherent to interprofessional collaboration. Firstly, a constructivist methodology and a process of continuous recursive interconnections among data, the participants and the theory allowed a narrative complex of the case histories to emerge. Secondly, the organisational approach proposed by Ehrard Friedberg proved to be an essential framework to help interpret the case histories. This organisational approach is based on a sociology of action and it specifically underlines the construction of collective action. The results of our research is presented in the form of a model of the process and the emergence of interprofessional collaboration. This model adapts and reformulates the four dimensions of Friedberg' s organisational approach and further qualifies them within the context of interprofessional collaboration in the health services.