L’observance des mesures-barrières de la COVID-19 et le quotidien des Burundais

Abstract

Pandemic prevention programmes in general and contagious diseases in particular must be incorporated in the social, cultural, economic and political structures of the social space in which they take place. In this context, popular knowledge and beliefs, socially shared practices and socio-political structures according to the health are privileged objects by socio- anthropology. So, in this research, we looked at these aspects in the context of covid-19, seeking to understand the non-compliance with the barrier measures of the pandemic in relation to the daily life of Burundians. This work shows that religious beliefs associated with the presumption of conspiracy and giving rise to a kind of social disempowment, the minimization of the pandemic and its assimilation to other infections leading to self-medication and use of alternative medicine, make the web of popular beliefs and knowledge detrimental to compliance with covid-19 barrier measures. Also, the disinterest in hygiene practises, the physical contacts by greeting gestures associated with their symbolic relational sense, the collective events and the fear of a deviant connotation taking on the barrier gestures of a ritual character, it removes the rational aspect of the observance of the barrier-measures and causes the slightest adherence to them to be relaxed and its persistence over time to require coercitive force. Finally, the diversity and complexity of economic activities associated with high economic dynamism, restrictive living and working conditions, the interweaving of political and medical discourse having enormous effects on collective behaviour, to the extent that there are certain contradictions between these discourses and where they are confronted by other discourses with varied contents as a result of the preponderance of mass communication through social networks, are factors of non-compliance with the measures-barriers to Covid- 19. However, the aspects identified in this research may contribute to the design of other research objects, but also professionally to the development of health crisis management programmes involving social, cultural and organizational realities and, downstream, to a gradual transformation of certain habits likely to affect the prevention of contagious diseases.