How to Cope with Health Issues in Mondulkiri?
Résumé
Dr. Meriem M’zoughi’s research focuses on the ways in which the population of Northeastern Cambodia understands the body and life and how it perceives pathogenic agents and infections. For this webinar, Dr. M’zoughi will dig deeper into the health behaviors of the Bunong people who live in Mondulkiri. She will present the kinds of medicines and types of healing practices used and the logic of care of those medicines and practices. Then, she will describe some of their natural remedies: what ingredient(s) are used in which way(s) for what purpose. These data will give us information to better understand the local knowledge of remedies and how it could inform us of the “humoral qualities” which are at stake during a therapeutic process. Her point here will be to study the biological knowledge – concerning body composition and pathological processes – of Cambodians who do not have formal biomedical training. These ethnographical data will be contextualized by some anecdotes dealing with different diseases, such as diabetes and covid-19.