KNOWLEDGES FROM HERE AND THERE, FROM YESTERDAY AND TODAY. DIALOGUE, PRODUCTION AND SYNCRETISM OF POPULAR AND TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGES ABOUT ILLNESS IN EQUATORIAL GUINEA

In the African context, it is still common to explain population's behaviour by referring to ignorance and cultural determinism. According to this perspective, individuals and social groups would not mobilize any knowledge. The ability to generate knowledge would be the exclusive attribute of the technical-scientific sector. In fact, social subjects constantly produce and use knowledge for the management of the disease. From the social sciences, they are usually designated as popular knowledge. However, there are many common places around these knowledges that need to be overcome. On the basis of an ethnographic work carried out in Equatorial Guinea, this article invites us to unlink popular from ethnic and natural, as well as to overcome a perspective that places it exclusively as a legacy of the past. It involves both knowledges from here and there, from yesterday and today. It does not result from a single cultural language, but from a syncretic plurilingualism, which must be analyzed. It involves elements from the health sector, from the magical-religious sphere, as well as from prosaic domestic practices. Popular knowledge is not exclusively the result of cultural representations. It is also built from everyday experiences. Far from forming predefined action schemes, it is essentially "practical knowledge", whose logics are permanently updated. Individuals are not just cultural products. They elaborate the knowledge in a continuous experimentation process and of multiple interactions with the environment. It results from an unfinished interpretive process, fed by one's own experiences and those of others.